The margin of hesitation

Y-5

THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

THE MARGIN OF
HESITATION

BY

FRANK MOORE COLBY

//

Author of

"IMAGINARY OBLIGATIONS" and "CONSTRAINED
ATTITUDES"

NEW YORK
DODD. MEAD AND COMPANY

1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
. DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

CONTENTS

I TROLLEY CARS AND DEMOCRATIC RAPTURES 2

II THINKING IT THROUGH IN HASTE 11

III THE LANGUAGE OF FEMINIST DEBATE. ... 23

IV PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 48

V HATING BACKWARDS 58

VI AFTER THE WAR IN THOMPSONTOWN . . . . 71

VII INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 85

VIII THE LESSON OF LITERARY WAR LOSSES. . . 93

IX ON BEHALF OF HAROLD MCCHAMBER 106

X SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS 113

XI INCORPORATED TASTE 119

XII BARBARIANS AND THE CRITIC 126

XIII REVIEWER'S CRAMP 135

XIV How TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 145

XV CONFESSIONS OF A GALLOMANIAC 154

XVI THE CLASSIC DEBATE 173

XVII THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 189

XVIII TAILOR BLOOD AND THE ARISTOCRACY OF

FICTION 205

XIX OUR REFINEMENT. . .213

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TROLLEY-CARS AND DEMOCRATIC
RAPTURES

If the appearance of the people on both sides
of the car shakes your confidence in the future of
democracy; if, while your eye travels along those
two deadly parallels of blank-featured human
latitude, you mutter to yourself, " Blood will tell,
and after all class systems are necessary," and
wonder what the world will come to when it is
left to the plain people, such exceedingly plain
people, for example, as those five awful ones
nearest the door; and if you feel all your radical
ism oozing out of you, including the initiative
and referendum, recall of judges, short ballot, and
proportionate taxation of swollen fortunes; and
if, as .six more of them get in each with a face
like a boiled potato, you begin to distrust the
whole foundation of popular rights, even trial by
jury, even habeas corpus; if, I say, this sort of
thing happens to you now and again, as no doubt
it does, there is always an easy means of con
solation.

THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

Photographs of European royal families were
published almost every week during the war, and
can be obtained from the files of the newspaper
supplements. Clip them and paste them properly
and they will cure this phase of democratic melan
choly. I have here a set of Hapsburgs whose
faces if placed side by side would be as desolating
as anything ever contemplated in the subway.
Line a trolley-car with these Hohenzollern heads
(without any helmets on them, naturally) and no
one would suspect the presence of any person
above the rank of gasfitter. He would merely
suspect that the car was headed for the borough
of the Bronx. Add to the rich supply of wooden
visages in the various branches of these two
families, all the pudgy, inane, commonplace, un
pleasant, or commercial countenances possessed by
the members of every other royal or ducal dynasty
for the past century or two; place them in two
rows with only the heads showing, and you will
feel as you would feel on the way to Coney
Island on a Sunday afternoon, except perhaps that
you will miss the kingly features of the Long
Island railroad conductor, or the royal bearing
of his youthful heir apparent, the brakeman. My
own collection of royal personages — and I have
no reason to think the photographs inaccurate —
makes every morning subway trip seem like a
royal progress.

TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 3

But though reconciled to the future of de
mocracy, including that of the people in the sub
way, I cannot be sanguine about it. The pleasures
of the advanced thinkers who assure me of it
are denied me. I never have any luck in picking
out the signs of the times. Even when I do suc
ceed in catching up with an advanced thinker I
never share that bright and early feeling. For
example, I once got abreast of a man much ad
mired in his day for mental forwardness. I for
get his name, but recall that it was short and
energetic, and suited to this Age of Steel — some
thing like Chuggs, I think. He had been pent
up as a young man in some college professorship,
but had broken away and was lecturing on pro
gress along all the principal railways of the
country.

Professor Chuggs was one of those who as
sure us at short intervals that the present moment
is the most egregious moment of the most egregi
ous year of the most egregious century that "the
world has ever seen," and that the next moment
will be more egregious still. He wrote a good
many of those articles before the war which de
clared that China is turning over in her sleep and
that Persia is buzzing; that in the waste places of
Africa five business men will soon be blooming
where one blade of grass had grown before; that
through the mighty arteries of commerce the life-

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blood of civilization is coursing to the extremities
of the earth; that already there is open plumbing
in Patagonia and that steam drills are busy in
Tibet. He used correctly all the terms employed
in his business, including "giant strides."

His magazine, "The On-Rush," which was de
fined in a sub-title as "A Handbook of the Coming
Cataclysm,1' announced as its policy the avoidance
of conformity with "every bourgeois conception,"
which, in its application seemed simple enough;
for the writers had merely to find out what a bour
geois conception was, and then take a flying leap
away from it, no matter in what direction. It
opened with a "Hymn to Moral Rapidity," of
which one stanza ran, as I remember, something
like this :

One thought in the bush is worth two in the head,
And a dogma's the clutch of the hand of the dead ;
So pull, pull away from the sands of Cathay,
And forge to the forefront and strip for the fray.
Up and off with your mind in the morning.

So it tossed systems of philosophy about like
bean-bags, hit off each classic writer in a phrase
careless but final, was on familiar joking terms
with all the sciences, explained woman, silenced
history summed up everything and everybody —
the human race, the fathers of the church, genius,
love, marriage, and the future state. In short,

TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 5

each page was conscientiously prepared as a mus
tard-plaster to draw the blood to some unused
portion of the reader's intellect.

Yet it had no such effect. On the contrary,
one gathered from it nothing more specific or ex
citing than that materialism was an inadequate
philosophy, that socialism was in the air, that
there was corruption in politics, that education
did not educate, and that marriage was a good
deal of a bother. Apparently the editor and con
tributors had nerved themselves by battle songs
into repeating these common remarks of the tea-
table, all in a tone of desperate valor, as if hourly
expecting each one of them to be their last.

I suppose there must be " new thinkers" in this
country, and that they must sometimes come out
on the news-stands. Yet a "new thinker," when
studied closely, is merely a man who does not
know what other people have thought. The
" new thinker," if I may attempt a definition de
rived from my own unfortunate magazine read
ings, is a person who aspires to an eccentricity
far beyond the limits of his nature. He is a
fugitive from commonplace, but without the
means of effecting his escape.

Not that I deny the approach of the social
revolution. I merely say that since the social
revolution will come about through the sort of
people one ordinarily meets, it will not be par-

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ticularly exciting. This extreme excitement of
many social thinkers over the people one ordi
narily meets has nothing to do with the nature
of the people; it is a free gift of the temperament
of the thinkers themselves.

Possessed of this light, gay, literary disposition
they will often bubble over at the sight of persons
and objects that leave almost everybody feeling
rather spiritless. For example, an American so
cial thinker, presumably a middle-aged person
and living in one of the most prudent portions of
New England, that is to say near Mount Tom
in the state of Massachusetts, can become ecstatic
at the bare thought of an American business man.
According to him this business man "plays with
the earth mightily," and " grasps the earth and
the sky, like music." Railroads remind this social
thinker of Heaven.

Life is no tangled web for him, nor is the
world in the slightest degree unintelligible. War
and wickedness and all that sort of thing used to
trouble him a good deal, he says, but that was
before he had really thought them out; now he
feels quite comfortable about them. What is the
use of "puttering," he says, "theorizing, historiciz-
ing, diplomatizing?" Get down to business and
look humanity in the eye. People, he finds, are not
so bad as they seem, and the only trouble with
them is that living in a machine age they have got

TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 7

caught in the machinery. The way out of it is
easy. It is simply a matter of inspiring million
aire business men. "The inspired millionaire "
surrounded by his " inspired or elated labor " will
soon be filling the world with the " awful, beauti
ful resistless tread of the feet of the men of
peace."

Now this may well be true. Nobody knows
what might have happened already if Mr. Mor
gan, or the Rockefellers had had the advantages
of Moses. Or take a simpler case. Suppose the
president of the Boston and Maine railway passes
a night alone with this social thinker on the cloud-
capped summit of Mount Tom Massachusetts,
and comes down the next morning with eyes
aflame. He returns transfigured to his office and
soon the inspiration runs all along the line, stock
holders dancing and praising God, trains starting
on time amid Hosannas, and the seven devils that
are in every baggageman turned into swine and
drowned. Sanctification of other lines soon fol
lows, and there is no reason, assuming the divine
nature of the guidance, why it should not spread
rapidly throughout the world. There is no doubt
that by inspiring millionaire business men suffi
ciently anything can be done. But for that mat
ter inspiration and revelation could work wonders
through almost anybody — through a labor leader
as well as through a millionaire. Who knows,

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for example, whether Samuel Gompers walking
with the Lord might not have been just as effica
cious as John Wanamaker on the island of Pat-
mos? However, it is unreasonable to look too
closely into this matter. The main point is the
temperament of the writer. Exaltation can be
had by him on easy terms.

On the other hand an equally talented British
visitor on encountering the " average" American
business man was recently excited in a directly
opposite way, and yet almost as violently. The
business man is always the same, says he, " from
east to west, from north to south, everywhere,
masterful, aggressive, unscrupulous, egotistic;"
" a child with the muscles of a man;" " a preda
tory, unreflecting, naif, precociously accomplish
ed brute." It is a rare man to whom as he
travels about " everywhere " all business men
will seem the same. It springs from a gift of
nature.

Each of these writers ran on passionately in
this manner for many pages, quivering, ejaculat
ing, singing snatches of a psalm. They have
" watered the desert," says the American admirer
of business men, and " thought hundred year
thoughts," and said, " Come " to empires and
" Come " to the earth and sky. " Come, earth
and sky, thou shalt praise God with us ! " They
are the "masters of methods and slaves of

TROLLEY CARS AND RAPTURES 9

things," says the British rhapsodist, and " there
fore the conquerors of the world."

Such are the blessings of this buoyant temper.
For us rather jaded and humdrum persons it is
impossible to regard the coal man, much as we
dislike him, as a tiger, or to feel toward the rail
way station as toward the Holy Sepulchre. We
too crave that vision of the Boston and Maine
railroad tipped up like Jacob's ladder with the
shining forms of presidents, vice-presidents and
directors, ascending and descending, accompanied
by corporation counsel. And it would give a
pleasant spice of danger to our daily visits to the
green grocer, could we, like that other enthusiast,
regard him as a jungle beast.

But that is the way with it. Some men are con
demned from their nativity to matter of fact,
while others, surmounting all the obstacles of
variety, exception, and experience, can find a
" type " or a u superman," for the looking. The
term " business man," like the term " biped," or
" homo sapiens," leaves us cold and a little ab
stracted, but in the writers of brisk little papers
on enormous subjects, this, or any other large,
loose, shapeless, social designation will often
arouse the keenest personal feelings and implant
the stoutest convictions. They can get gooseflesh,
or even the assurance of apocalypse, from the
mere contemplation of generic expressions which

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convey no emotion whatever to any of the rest of
us, except perhaps that of being a little at sea.

Finally another social thinker that I have
recently encountered soars far away from the
earthiness of these conceptions, far away from the
earth itself, and looking down from this height
on its misguided populations, thus addresses them:
Begin all over again, he says. If the new charter
of human rights does not re-create everything, it
will create nothing at all. Make a clean sweep
of all notions imposed from without; make a clean
sweep of everything bequeathed to you. Away
with God, church, king, priest, ruling class, the
aristocrat, and the old-fashioned republican, the
school as it now is, privilege of every sort, chari
ties, inheritance rights, national frontiers, colonial
power, and so on with much circumstance as to
the range and depth of this damnation, but with
no information as to the ways and means of doing
the next thing that remains to be done after the
damnation is achieved. For the next thing, he
insists, is this: Be the people of peoples, and set
up at once the universal republic, founded on
equality and justice. And he is just as elated and
just as sure that the thing will be readily accom
plished, as if he had never traveled in a trolley
car and never looked hard at the sort of Utopian
ingredients that all trolley cars seem forever des
tined to contain.

THINKING IT THROUGH IN HASTE

Though often entranced by that brilliant group
of cosmic problem-solvers — Mr. H. G. Wells,
Mr. Bernard Shaw and others — I insist on my
personal iresponsibility for the state of Mankind
as a whole. These men are much too busy nursing
civilization. They regard it as a sort of potted
plant which they fear to find frost-bitten of a
morning. This is especially clear in certain writ
ings of Mr. H. G. Wells, in which he shows an
impatient desire to tidy up the whole world at
once. At one swoop he would remove the shirts
from our clothes-lines and the errors from our
rninds. The world is too large for his feather
duster; he had thought to find it a smaller planet
that he might have kept at least half-way clean.
Now see what he has on his hands — everything
in a mess, Africa backward, China careless, the sex
relation by no means straightened out, socialism,
imperialism, industrialism, planless progressivism
littering up things, a great war and its greater
failure, and nobody caring a rap — at times it
seems to his housewifely spirit almost too much
for one person to manage. And then that infernal

11

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human diversity — slow minds, stupid minds, minds
made up too soon, or not at all, closed minds,
tough minds, tender minds — what is to be done
with them? He burns to do something.

In one of his books he describes himself in fancy
as going about the country and, with the keenest
pleasure, spearing all Anglican bishops. Though
I am myself a stranger to the sport, I believe the
pleasure of spearing bishops is exaggerated. For
once begun it must lead logically to a daily drudg
ery of slaughter among the great crowds of folk
who are not intellectually independent or morally
daring — lead, in short, to the massacre of those
who are not particularly exciting, a large task and
tedious, owing to their quantity.

I wonder if we commonplace persons are not
right after all in a certain instinct of distrust to
ward these gifted writers. We believe implicitly
in their fancies and not at all in their facts. We
believe in the world they have invented and not
in the world they have observed; and we distrust
them utterly as world-pushers. The signs are
plain — terribly plain sometimes — that it is when
they have the smallest notions that they say their
largest things.

In common with other admirers of Mr. H. G.
Wells, I am always charmed by him and his
heroes when they are thinking things out and see
ing things through, but I am profoundly disap-

THINKING IN HASTE 13

pointed by the sort of thing they think themselves
into. Mr. Max Beerbohm described the situation
with perfect accuracy a few years ago when he
represented a Wells hero, after a "lot of clear,
steady, merciless thinking" about the muddle of
the universe, as finding the solution in the "Pro
visional Government of England by Female
Foundlings." I reproduce a passage of this most
righteous parody, which is based, I think, on
The New Macchiavelli:

True, there was Evesham. He had shown an exceed
ingly open mind about the whole thing. He had at once
grasped the underlying principles, thrown out some
amazingly luminous suggestions. Oh yes, Evesham was
a statesman, right enough. But had even he really be
lieved in the idea of a Provisional Government of Eng
land by Female Foundlings? * * * "You've got to
pull yourself together, do you hear?" he said to himself.
"You've got to do a lot of clear, steady, merciless think
ing, now, to-night. You've got to persuade yourself that
Foundlings or no Foundlings, this regeneration of man
kind business may be set going — and by you."

This is not in the least unfair when you consider
Mr. Wells's exultant discoveries during the last
half dozen years or so, down to and including his
recent discovery of God. Here are just a few
of the problems and their solutions:

The future of America : This to his mind re
quired instant settlement. It was absurd that

i4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

nobody should have a plan. They were letting
America drift — that is what it amounted to —
and he simply could not bear the thought of it.
"Let America slide?" said he to himself on the
way over. "Let a whole continent go to the dogs
just for the lack of a little, clear, straight, beauti
ful thinking? I should be a coward if I shirked
it." The solution came to him before he reached
New York and was confirmed in a conversation
a day or two afterwards. The idea, I think, was
that we should all marry negro women, so far as
there were enough of them to go around.

What is humanity as a whole doing? That was
another question which everybody was dodging at
the time out of sheer mental indolence. What is
the nature of the world process? His hero thinks
it out. His hero "takes high, sweeping views, as
larks soar." He spends five years in South Africa,
two years in Asia, six months in America, and
sketches briefly civilization as it has pottered along
in all those continents. "Pottered," that is the
word for it. For what is civilization? What is
it? Why, hang it all, it's a "mere flourish out of
barbarism." What is Bombay? What is Cal
cutta? Mere "feverish pustules on the face of
Hindustan." Something must be done about it.
He thinks still harder and at length it flashes on
him — the very thing — why had he not thought of
it before — a plan at once simple and vast, a plan

THINKING IN HASTE 15

that was immediately practicable, yet of enormous

future potentialities, a plan . Well, the plan

was, I believe, the incorporation of an interna
tional book concern which should publish the best
works in all languages, along with satisfactory
translations.

Then there was the whole sloppy subject of the
British Empire — King, army, colonies, Parlia
ment, Church, education, London Spectator, and
all that. A pretty mess they had made of it, and
not a blessed soul paying the least attention to it;
so another Wells hero had to think it out. "Why,"
said he, "the Empire and the monarchy and Lords
and Commons and patriotism and social reform
and all the rest of it is silly, SILLY beyond
words," and the hero in his irritation flung him
self right over into Labrador to think it out, and
finally, after weeks of cold, hard, bitter, ruthless
ratiocination, he cut down to the very roots of it,
and he emerged from Labrador with a Plan. The
plan consisted, I believe, in the publication of a
book to be entitled Limits of Language as a Means
of Expression — title subsequently changed to
From Realism to Reality.

Another hero of lark-soaring mind is annoyed
by the senseless refusal of almost everybody to
shape his life in such a manner as will redound
to the advantage of the beings who will people
the earth a hundred thousand years from now.

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A plan must be found. The thinking required is
terrific, but he does not flinch, and at last he has it.
It is the publication of a magazine called the
Blue Weekly, whose motto is to be Love and
Fine Thinking.

Meanwhile, aside from the sweeping of his
heroes, Mr. Wells in his own name was doing
some rather brisk chamber-work about the uni
verse. He let in the light on the labor question,
as one might open a blind. He shot his mind back
to the twitching, thrusting protoplasm of the
Carboniferous slime and he shot it forward to
the final man, half-angel, who should stand on
the earth as on a footstool and stretch his hand
among the stars, and he delivered a lecture on that
final man before some learned body. He gave a
ship-shape account of the human race in twenty
pages or so, seeing it through the ape-man stage,
barbarism, and civilization, and well along toward
the Great Solution, and then at the end put it all
into a diagram, not too long for a busy man to
carry in his pocketbook; it ran from complete
savagery all the way to the great, harmonious,
happy future state, and it was only about five
inches long.

Some people complain that a Wells hero really
does not think at all but merely explodes into
fragments of periodical literature. I cannot see
the force of this objection. Of course, Mr. Wells

THINKING IN HASTE 17

is not, in the austere sense of the term, a thought
ful person, and he does not make his characters
engage in any such dry, lonely, and unpopular
process as thinking. If he did, they would be
quite generally repulsive. But he does somehow
contrive the illusion that a good deal is going on
in their minds, and he makes them spit out be
tween clenched teeth a platitude that you will often
mistake for an astonishing idea. That is the
measure of Mr. Wells's skill. The hero's mind
does really sometimes seem to soar over the whole
of civilization, when it is merely coquetting with
last month's magazines.

Analyze the conversation in a Wells novel, and
it will remind you sometimes of the cumulative
index to periodical literature, and sometimes of
the table of contents of a text-book on geology;
but what other novelist could give you the im
pression that an index to periodicals was a fiery
thing or that a geological title-list was almost
passionate? I for one surrender instantly to the
persuasiveness of Mr. H. G. Wells, and when
the thoughts come red-hot from the hero's brain,
they almost always warm me up, even though I
have met them months before, cold and clammy,
in some magazine. But then comes that awful
moment of deflation, when the hero finally thinks
things out — thinks things utterly down and out —
gets what he is after — the great solution or the

1 8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

great keynote, or the mighty mission that is pro
portionate to the mighty measure of his mind —
and the solution is something like the Endowment
of Maternity, and the keynote is, perhaps, God
bless our home, and the mission is, for example,
the chairmanship of an international commission
for the promotion of poultry farming.

It is, of course, exorbitant to demand of Mr.
Wells that the great idea when once attained shall
come up to our expectations, but he might at
least kill the hero off while still pursuing, and
never let him bag the game. It is unsportsman
like to start him off after the largest sort of
scientific moose, and then have him end up by
stealing somebody's magazine farmyard chickens.
Something of this sort happens in a good many
of his novels, and I believe it results from his too
great preoccupation with the details of an unim
aginable future state.

Out of an apparently impenetrable past, says
Mr. Wells, science has reconstructed the mega
therium, and he swears that the megatherium is
every bit as real to him as any hippopotamus he
has ever met Why then is it not possible, he asks,
that the same amount of scientific energy should
ultimately evoke from an impenetrable future the
creatures that shall succeed us on this earth ? No
body approaching science by way of Mr. Wells
can deny this cheerful possibility. If, from the

THINKING IN HASTE 19

past, science can produce a pre-horse or eohippus,
it may of course call up from the future an after-
horse or hystero-hippus, if it has not already done
so, and if, on looking back, it finds the ape-man or
pithecanthrope, it might conceivably, on looking
forward, chance on one of Mr. Wells's angel-men,
which, in its mad desire to raise the devil with the
English language, it would call either an angel-
anthrope or an anthropangeloid. No one will dis
pute the point with Mr. Wells.

The only important point to the reader is what
happens to Mr. Wells when he is too much pre
occupied with these two extremes. However real
the megatherium may seem to Mr. Wells, to him
the hippopotamus for fiction's purpose is infinitely
better company. The imagination can play around
a hippopotamus but on a megatherium it can only
toil. In the same way, owing to the lack of a
generally understood social background, ape-men,
cave men and the like are always failures in con
temporary novels, and half-angels are worse still.
Fiction cannot proceed in a social vacuum and the
future space which a Wells hero thinks himself
out into is, socially speaking, void.

That is why he comes back so empty-minded
that he snatches at the first progressive-sounding
magazine title he finds. It is unfortunate that a
writer who can deal delightfully with actual
human beings should think himself clean out of all

20 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

relation to them. In s-everal of his books Mr.
Wells is wholly concerned with the thinking out,
not at all with the people who do the thinking.
This is especially true of a certain story in which
a bishop finds his way to God. It is not important
that Mr. Wells does not make the bishop see
God or that he does not make us see religion,
but it is important that he does not make us even
see the bishop. We do not mind our not arriving
anywhere nearly so much as our not having any
company on the way.

I confess, however, that when Mr. Wells is
really eloquent about his Great Solution, no mat
ter which one it may be, he is apt to have me under
his thumb for hours. Suppose, for example, he
should become very much excited about malted
milk, and see in it a solution of every problem
that now troubles society. I do not know whether
Mr. Wells has as yet written a novel on malted
miilk, though he has championed other causes in
his fiction that did not at first sight S'eem to me
more promising. But I do know that if he should
write a novel on malted milk, it would, for a while
at least fairly sweep me off my feet. I should
believe that malted milk, steadily consumed
through the ages, on and on, would really produce
that final perfect human race dreamt of by the
hero of the narrative. It may be that for his
wide and probably painful magazine readings he is

THINKING IN HASTE 21

taking an ironical revenge and that these Great
Solutions are only a sort of practical joke on his
contemporaries. In that case, I have been often
taken in.

The only excuse for thus singling out Mr. Wells
is that he is in these respects representative. Vast
numbers of contemporary humanitarian writers
never rise above this level to which he sometimes
descends. Moreover this body of writing which
has obviously not taken the trouble even to catch
up with the past is admired on the singular ground
that it has overtaken the future. It is the journal
ism of prematurity.

It is the subject or the occasion of those breath
less articles on the "modern spirit" and the way
we speed along; on the revolutions of taste within
a decade; on the terrific onward modern plunges
of the novelist of last week; all written by excitable
commentators who exclaim with astonishment and
sometimes alarm at the contemporaneousness of
their contemporaries.

But it is well known that these audacities and
modernities in no wise account for the hold of a
book on the attention. Thoughts just as bold and
newly dated have often put us fast asleep. In
books it is not the progress that is exciting, it is
the person you are progressing with. There is
not a day without its prosy iconoclasms, when
some of the dullest people ever known will blaze

22 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

away at God, government, the family, and the
moral sense with the most violent intentions and
the drowsiest results. When the ideas are all
about us in the air there does not seem any great
audacity in presenting them. It seems rather like
calmly blowing back our own breath into our
faces. "Modernity" is an accidental quality of the
books to which I have referred, having no more
to do with their essential worth than has the day
of the month on which they were printed. Be
cause everything is swept away that preceded the
date of publication, and to-day's superstitions are
substituted for yesterday's superstitions, and be
cause there is an unaccountable tendency to deify
the middle of next week, which is not a very in
teresting object of worship, it does not follow in
the least that it is a modern book. It does not
even follow that it is in any essential sense a
book at all. Literature does not stay behind with
progress; it moves along with experience.

THE LANGUAGE OF FEMINIST DEBATE

I do not agree with certain representatives of
Roman Catholic opinion that the modern sociolog
ist does more harm than good. I would not burn
a modern sociologist or even abolish him, if I
could. Considering him as an indefatigable
rodent burrowing among the roots of social com
plexities that he cannot understand, I rather ad
mire him, but when he comes to the surface too
soon, as he often does, and proclaims enormous
certitudes as to the soul of this nation or that, and
as to the direction that human society is bound
to take, I should like to get him back into his hole
again. And I question the value of a great many
of his biological and evolutionary analogies. Take
the man who some years ago reached the con
clusion after the most violent sociological endeav
ors that the average politician was something of
an ass. Why need he have fought his way to such
a simple consummation, when he might so easily
have jumped to it? Not that he said in so many
words, politicians are asses. He put it sociologic
ally. Party cries and iterative watchwords, said
he, biologically, psychologically, and sociologically

23

24 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

regarded, are modes of appeal to the instincts
of the herd, inherited from remote, probably pre
historic, zoological ancestors. But when you an
alyze this it comes to nothing more than saying
that politicians are like the prehistoric ass, which
adds little to our knowledge, and even as a term
of abuse is not much more effective.

"The scarlet paint and wolf-skin headdress of
a warrior, or the dragon mark of a medicine man,
appeal, like the smile of a modern candidate,
directly to our instinctive nature."

I see no value in this discovery. Had soci
ology never been invented I should have known
that the dragon-mark of a medicine man wa^> oven
more primitive in its appeal than the smiles of
comparatively ancient types of presidential candi
dates.

Laughter, he went on in his strange thoughtful-
ness, laughter occurs sometimes in political life,
but sociologically considered it is "comparatively
unimportant." Nevertheless let us consider it
bio gene tic ally:

"It may have been evolved because an animal
which suffered a slight spasm in the presence of
the unexpected was more likely to be on its guard
against its enemies, or it may have been the merely
accidental result of some fact in our nervous
organization which was otherwise useful."

Why all these sociological hypotheses of laugh-

FEMINIST DEBATE 25

ter? My own hypothesis is just as good: Laugh
ter, I contend, is nothing more than an attenuated
hiccough, pleasurably reminiscent of the excesses
of our ancestors. Sociologists can never let laugh
ter alone, though you would think it was the last
thing they would want to bother with. There
was one of them the other day who after a patient
study of Aristotle's Portico, Bergson on Laughter,
Bain on the Emotions and the Will, Kuno Fischer
in "Ueber den Witz," Cicero on Oratory, Stanley
Hall on "The Psychology of Tickling, Laughter,
and the Comic" and some twenty other authorities,
came to the conclusion that "Laughter at any rate
is highly relaxing," but as this seemed a little too
informal, he hastened to express it as a "pyscho-
genetic law." "Laughter," said he, "is one of
the means which nature has provided to preserve
psychic equilibrium and prevent more serious out
breaks." In its former state no one would have
noticed this remark, and now it has become a
sociological law, highly prized, I believe, in seri
ous quarters. One never can tell the sociological
possibility of some little thing that seems hardly
worth the saying. Thus if you say, he swears
like a pirate, you are not sociological. But sup
pose you pull yourself together and say: Pro
fanity in that it relaxes the inner tension by a
sudden nervous discharge and offers a means of
escape from social inhibitions, is, when phylo-

26 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

genetically considered, nature's method under the
conditions of modern civilized life of providing
an outlet for primitive emotions which in an earlier
period were apt to take more socially injurious
forms, such as piracy. You will then be taken
for a sociologist. I do not say you will really be
a sociologist, but you will look like one, especially
if you add a bibliography.

Sociology, as I have lately seen it streaming
from the press, seems to consist of two main varie
ties. There is the sort above mentioned that tells
in a strange language what everybody knows al
ready. You recognize your own thoughts, though
terribly disfigured. Then there is the full-winged
or apocalyptic kind that tells you what nobody
ever could know. This is the sort that sweeps the
heroes of Mr. H. G. Wells off to Labrador or
India in order to think out civilization, and that
propelled an excellent French sociologist, during
the war, straight through the soul of the entire
German people.

But I am here concerned especially with the
effect of social studies upon the language of fem
inist controversy. I recall, for example, a solid
treatise greatly admired in its day, written by a
German woman of enormous industry. Toward
nonsense in all its forms she maintained an attitude
of extraordinary seriousness. She did not even
call it nonsense, but enveloped it in scientific-sound-

FEMINIST DEBATE 27

ing terms that made it seem quite dignified. Let
Michelet remark in a thoughtless moment, "You
must create your wife — it is her own wish," and
she straightway defined it as a "subjective erotic
fantasy." Some of the simplest and most familiar
types of men disappeared beneath her Greek de
rivatives. For example, there was he who swag
gers a good deal in his own household and is
"tame and feeble" everywhere else — he who for
all ordinary purposes might with perfect adequacy
be termed a silly sort of man. This simple defini
tion by no means contented her. She said he
"experiences a dyscrasy," and that "between his
sexual life and his career as a citizen there exists
a latent contradiction which secretly is, perhaps,
as great a trial to him as to the wife who is de
pendent on him." A licentious, domineering man,
a weak, passive, crafty, false, or ludicrous woman,
is an acratic person — that is to say, a "partially
developed being whose whole personality is deter
mined by teleological sex characteristics." They
are exponents of "centrifugal sexuality." On the
other hand, persons like the Christian saints are
iliastric, "the highest type of centripetal sexual
ity." Better still are the synthetic folk whose
sexuality is an equilibrium of the centrifugal and
the centripetal sexual tendency. She seemed to
have caught some bad verbal habit from almost
every science she had studied, but she had no

28 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

doubt suffered the most from sociology. Take,
for example, the simple and familiar precept that
women should advance in morality and intelligence
so far as possible without shattering the outward
decencies. What mind uncorrupted by the social
sciences would conceal it under this?

To emancipate oneself from the ethical normative of
femininity, which fetters individuality because of the
teleological limits of sex, is a distinct right. But to pre
serve its formal quality is the task of a free personality.

There was one good result, however, from her
excessive industry. She did some excellent de
structive work on the subject of Woman in Gen
eral. Many pages of her arguments may be
summed up in the single and apparently sound
thesis that Woman, with a capital letter, is a myth,
and that only women are realities. After a care
ful study of men's general statements about
Woman she concluded that Woman is merely a
"subjective fetish of sex," having no existence out
side the brain of the thinker. She made the fol
lowing collection of the foolish and contradictory
remarks of the thinkers: There is Lotze saying
that "the female hates analysis" and therefore
cannot distinguish the true from the false. There
is Lafitte saying that "the female prefers an
alysis." There is Kingsley calling her "the only
true missionary of civilization," and Pope calling

FEMINIST DEBATE 29

her a rake at heart; Havelock Ellis saying that
she cannot work under pressure, and Von Horn
saying that in the fulfilling of heavy requirements
she puts a man to shame; M. de Lambert that she
plays with love; Krafft-Ebing that her heart is
toward monogamy; Brissac that usouls have no
sex," Feuerbach that they have; Laura Marholm
that "the significance of woman is man," Frau
Andreas Salome that woman is one "who en
deavors to realize an ever broader, ever richer
unfolding of her innate self;" Havelock Ellis that
nervous irritability has ever been her peculiar
characteristic; Mobius that women are "strongly
conservative and hate all innovation;" Hippel that
"the spirit of revolution broods over the female
sex;" Lecky that woman is superior both in in
stinctive virtues and in those which arise from a
sense of duty; Lombroso that there is "a half-
criminaloid being even in the normal woman;"
Bachhofer that "Law is innate in women;" and
von Hartmann that the whole sex is unjust and
unfair.

This seems a fair illustration of the condition
of men when they write about Woman. In con
temporary writings their state is even worse. In
reading all the little papers on this giant theme
I have often wondered what it is that so balloons
Man's thoughts of Woman just when he is about
to print an article and at no other time — the sort

30 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

of man who could not fathom a single concrete
personality. Why this mad rush of certainties
with Man and Woman and Marriage and Society
and God and Cosmos crammed into nutshells and
all dispatched in about five thousand words. By
what apocolocyntosis or pumpkin-change should
the head of a journalistic comprise of a sudden a
"Female Cosmos" merely because he wants to
write an article? By what miraculous distention
was an entire Superwoman squeezed into the tight,
three-cornered intellect of Mr. Bernard Shaw?
For some of the most charming writers of our day
seem subject to this strange inflation. Woman,
the Female Cosmos, "vast, broad, universal, and
liberal; "Woman, the Superwoman, "ever pursu
ing Man at the behest of the Life Force" — what
in the world is any middle-sized intellect to do
about her? One thing is certain: There is no
possible chance of disproving anything that the
light literary character who invents her may have
chosen to lay at her door. Refutation in this airy
region is impracticable. Yet no matter how frivol
ous the writer may be, some feminist attempts
the refutation.

A few years ago, for example, some harmless
professor of biology let his mind sweep from the
feminine germ cell all the way down to Mrs. Pank-
hurst, and filled a page of a Sunday newspaper
with guesses as to Woman's place in nature, in

FEMINIST DEBATE 31

human history, and throughout all future time.
For aught a finite mind could tell, they may have
been good guesses, but it is not likely that even
the professor himself had any deep conviction that
in so large and blank a matter he was guessing
right; he was thinking rather of filling that page
of the newspaper. Yet his words were taken
seriously at the time, and several women writers
are even now rebuking him for his "views,"
though I am sure he was guiltless of holding any.
Nobody has any "views" on the subject of
Woman. When a man begins a sentence with the
word "Woman" you may at all times, everywhere,
blame him for the beginning, but you have no
right to quarrel with any way in which he may
choose to let it end. Yet to these careless, large
assertions women retort seriously, even bitterly,
and will often toil with might and main at their
refutation.

Once, for example, the woman suffragists
throughout this country, stung by the taunt that
they had lost the cunning art of domesticity,
plunged into the wildest household activities. For
weeks they sewed things by hand, boiled them,
and put them up in jars, and when they were
finished threw them all into a public building in
New York City and dared the world to come and
see. It was to show that despite their strength
of mind they had not lost their womanhood — in

32 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

reply to some magazine article whose writer had
long since forgotten what he said.

And there was one point especially on which all
argument was thrown away. There was no use
in trying to reason a hominist out of his profes
sional timidity. When he said, as his wont was,
at short intervals, that he feared the neglect of
home and husband if women voted, it would have
been wiser to take no notice. Whenever the hom
inist quoted his St. Paul and cited those cherished
examples from history — Penelope, Griselda, Ruth,
Boaz, and the bride of Peter the Pumpkin-eater —
there was always a retaliatory article instancing
powerful and public-spirited women of to-day who
in spite of everything had retained their woman
hood.

This very laborious repartee was unnecessary.
The husband marooned in a kitchen with his wife
off voting all day long, was not an image that
haunted us greatly in our daily lives, vivid as it
seemed in the pages of certain essayists. Taking
American husbands as they were this was never
a natural anxiety. The chief task of the woman
suffragists in this country was to prove that women
had interest enough in politics, not to allay the
fear that they might have too much.

Times have changed, and politics may now be
discussed even at the womanly woman's hearth
stone, but it ought always to be remembered that

FEMINIST DEBATE 33

we owe to the advancing woman, terrible as she
was, this emancipation of the American male. It
was not the rule in the American household that
the man repressed the woman's political aspira
tions; on the contrary he generally encountered
the sternest feminine opposition to any full ex
pression of his own.

For a long period there were few American
husbands who in their own families dared to be
as political as they wished. Looking back on that
grim domestic tyranny of the cold shoulder and
the absent mind, the yawn, the interruption, the
glazing eye, the sudden vanishings in the midst
of sentences really eloquent, who can picture the
American man as trying to keep women from get
ting into politics ? They were all so obviously try
ing to keep politics from getting out of him.

This practical side of the matter was once
summed up by a friend whose point of view rather
appealed to me. "In regard to woman," said he,
"I have no sympathy whatever with anti-feminist
fears of the neglect of the family. If, with the
march of mechanical improvement, housekeeping
grows easier, what is to be done with the released
housekeeping force? Turn it back, say the anti-
feminists to the expanding woman, and house-
keep more fiercely. Let that great managing tal
ent which once ranged from corn-field to nursery,
rocked the cradle, smoked the ham, reaped, spun,

34 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

milk, stewed, chopped, and sewed up everybody,
wreak itself on one man, two children, five rooms,
and a bath.

"Think of the households in which domesticity
boils in its too narrow channel with a dispropor
tionate force, the souls which go out into wall
paper, the excesses of conjugal scrutiny and child-
care, the surplus anxieties, the many needless
strenuosities of wedded life. An active-minded
married woman in these days without outlet is
bound to overdo her marriage. Suppose you mar
ried a very efficient person, and the only object of
that efficiency were you. Take a woman of
marked executive, though latent, ability — a woman
who might have been Zenobia if she had had the
chance. Would you, in a small suburban home,
care to be Zenobia's Palmyra? Anti-feminists in
cluding a large body of sentimental epigram
matists have had much to say of the home as
woman's kingdom and the sanctity of woman's
sphere. But would any one of them wish to be
a woman's sphere? Husbands of able but old-
fashioned wives are worn to the bone by their
wives1 unduly limited activities. They would
gladly see their feminine forces dissipated."

"The main danger, as I see it," he went on, "is
that they will not be sufficiently dissipated. I am
afraid of the great pressure of released mother-
power upon purely personal affairs. In the politi-

FEMINIST DEBATE 35

cal domain, if anyone tells me that women, now
that they have the ballot, will vote more foolishly
t)han men, I can reply tranquilly that that is incredi
ble. In the economic domain, if anyone tells me
that the average woman is not fit for the large re
sponsibilities of business enterprise, I can reflect
comfortably that there is nothing whatever in the
modern world to show that the average man is,
either. In both of these fields moreover, the great
feminine innovation is already so well along that
nobody will be startled much by the further
steps that it will take. But when it comes to
the personal domain, my mind is less adequately
prepared, and in some respects unreconciled.
There is a hard reasonableness about women in
all matters that pertain to health and ruthless hy
giene is pretty sure to sweep over the community in
the long run if their will prevails. Owing to
certain dispositions into the details of which it is
not now necessary to enter the duties of mother
hood under the new regime will be considerably
reduced. Great quantities of mother-power thus
released will be poured into the public life where
it will take the form of health control, minute,
inquisitorial and all-embracing."

"A single woman can often make a man uncom
fortable by the application of her cool reason to
his irregularities in food, drink, underclothing,
getting up and going to bed. In the new regime

36 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

every adult citizen will probably be exposed to the
equivalent of one hundred units of mother-power.
A certain warm casualness that is promised in the
domain of the sexual relations does not in my
opinion offset the icy regularity of the tobacco-
less, wineless, physiologically matronized state
which is indicated by the most advanced and
thoughtful leaders of the movement.

"I may learn in time to flit from concubine to
concubine as a matter of course, as is earnestly de
sired by an Austrian feminist. But of what use
is this element of variety, if every moment of my
life is under the merciless scrutiny of the Inquisi-
tress-General of Diet, the Women's Eugenical
Board, the Committee on Private Life Inspection,
and the Bureau of Sanitary Propagation. I am
perfectly willing to renounce that attitude of pro
tection toward woman which her leaders denounce
as the expression of a slave morality, but I am
somewhat concerned by the amount of real pro
tection she is threatening to bestow on me. One
gathers from recent literature not merely that
mother-right is coming into its own. One gathers
that mother-right is coming into almost every
thing. But that may be merely intentional over
statement in order to startle one into paying
attention, just as a suffragette used to break the
windows."

As to breaking windows, by the way, who could

FEMINIST DEBATE 37

blame woman for answering wildly to the confused
arguments that were brought to bear upon her?
Any one who can recall the incoherencies of
woman suffrage argumentation must, I think, ad
mit that however mad the suffragists seemed, the
opposing hominists seemed even madder. It may
well be that suffragettes went insane in an honest
endeavor to meet insane objections. When they
threw pepper on a statesman perhaps it was de
signed as an answer to some such anti-suffrage
argument, as "Woman is a capsule covering empti
ness alone. Only man can make it full." It does
not seem a reasonable answer, but then I cannot
imagine what a reasonable answer would be, and
a normal mind might be dislocated in finding one.
It was not easy to follow a woman's reasoning
when she smashed a statesman's hat in, tore his
buttons off, burned buildings, broke glass, ripped
Bellinis and threw apples at everybody, and as
arguments they seemed irrelevant to the question
of the suffrage. But it was no easier to follow the
hominist when he exploded after his own manner
in generalities. Indeed, the missiles of the mili
tants seemed more applicable to human affairs
than did the hominist's enormous certainties about
Woman as the supreme being, holding up the
universe amidst the "poetry of the pots and pans;"
Woman as the universal principle of Thrift;
Woman as the Queen Elizabeth who decides

38 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

"sales, banquets, labours and holidays;'* Woman
as the Aristotle who teaches "morals, manners,
theology, and hygiene. "

I do not wonder that women became confused
when they read these things and replied with ob
jects equally relevant and considerably more con
crete. When a learned and entertaining writer
took a long breath and called a suffragist "a jade,
a giantess, a Hanoverian rat, a San Jose scale,
a noxious weed, and a potato bug;" when another
still more profound person declared that women
do their thinking in "henids," whilst uin man the
henids have passed through a process of clarifica
tion" and that uthe very idea of a henid forbids
its description; it is merely a something" — I am
not surprised that the individual mentioned was
somewhat haphazard in her replies.

I do not maintain that throwing a cabinet min
ister downstairs is either so desirable or so inter
esting as the essays of the brilliant and well-known
hominists from which I have quoted. I merely
contend that it is just as reasonable.

Sex-patriots are indeed a fierce folk, be they
feminists or hominists, and they have no patience
with people who in a modest bewilderment re
frain from taking sides. That is why the usual
treatise on "Woman, Her Cause and Cure," con
tains so little for us outsiders. It is intended as
a missile for the contrary-minded, not as a message

FEMINIST DEBATE 39

to those who have not yet made up their minds.
Is Woman that supreme being whose "two strong
arms are the pillars that sustain the universe" or
is she that "capsule covering an emptiness which
man alone can fill?" There is the naked choice.
Writers on Woman would think it base to hesi
tate. And they are angry if you try to pin them
down to the particulars of actual experience.
Writers on Woman hate to be pinned down to
anything. It is a leaping kind of competition be
tween feminists and hominists and each side thinks
nothing of taking six centuries at a dash. Up-
in-the-air habits have been formed in consequence.
But on the whole I think the hominist cut the sor
rier figure in the great debate. The nature of
actual women seemed never to have entered his
mind. Once visited perhaps by Ruth, Penelope,
or some female relative since deceased, his mind
was now deserted save for a few mottoes and the
rush of the wind in empty spaces.

There was one, some years ago, the spirit of
whose writings admirably typified his kind. He
was a man of stern and ancient faiths, a believer
in early woman, and compulsory charm, alter
nately angry and alarmed over the needless
changes since the time of Homer. He said women
were sterile and dying out; also that they were
deadly vermin always multiplying. Sometimes a
woman seemed to him a little weed soon to be up-

40 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

rooted; at others he would shrink from her as
from a boa constrictor. Again he would describe
her as a rat. Epithets that seemed to destroy one
another were seized by him apparently in the hope
that they would destroy her. Each sentence re
garded by itself was vigorous and interesting, and
even seemed to have a meaning when you forgot
the sentences that went before.

Great is the glory of that woman, he said, who
is not talked of for good or evil, who hath a veil
upon her head, who vaunteth not herself, — she
that is meek, and is not puffed up, and walks in
quietness, and is mysterious, and suffers long. He
chose as models Helen, Briseis, Penelope, Arete,
Clytemnestra, Chloris, and a few others from the
Greeks, and three from the Bible, and he said that
women had since then degenerated. To-day, he
said, all women were like udogs in a dance," and
the veil was rent and woman was ashamed. He
first proposed as a remedy that the right kind of
woman should fall in a cold-blooded virgin fury
upon the sugar-mouthed idle kind who lived within
melliferous walls. But in another mood he found
this inadequate and declared that the only desir
able form of society was that in which all women
dressed in skins. Dissatisfied with this in turn,
he finally decided that it was better for everybody
concerned that women should live in trees.
Women were never really happy, he said, unless

FEMINIST DEBATE 41

they lived in trees, and on that point his argu
ment rested. This book was perhaps more ad
mired than any other of its class, for it was quoted
in all the serious journals in Europe and America
and translated into many foreign languages; and
it may be for aught I know, part of the bedside
reading at this moment of ten thousand hominists.
Now the question arose at once whether he
really cared for all these feminine virtues he had
praised and if so why he had no word of com
mendation for the sort of modern women who
excelled in them. A collection of feminine sim
plicities such as he had praised was published soon
afterwards by a woman writer. Why single out
Penelope for meekness, for example? Arunta
women, said she, are much meeker, for if an
Arunta woman leaves the house and walks about,
her brother has the privilege of spearing her.
Was Penelope after all more pious or self-effac
ing than an everyday modern Koniag? she in
quired. "In Alaska a Koniag woman fasts and
lies wrapped in a bearskin in a corner of her hut
when her husband goes whaling." Woman
"vaunteth not herself" among the Zulus for a Zulu
woman may not even speak her husband's name.
Charm, mystery, veil on the head, walking in
quietness, and all the rest are as she pointed out
nowadays plentiful, sometimes with cannibalism,
sometimes without. In other words, the answer

42 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

of this feminist to this hominist was simply that
if he really desired these virtues in women he had
only to look about the world. There was no need
whatever to regret the passing of the Greek and
Hebrew meek ones. There were Thlinket women
to-day who were much meeker. There were at
this moment sweet natures on the Upper Congo
and among the Tshi, Wagogo, Kaya-Kaya, Aleuts,
Bantus, Ostiaks, and Yarabaimba — sweet femin
ine natures absolutely unspoiled.

The writer of the book in question did not, of
course, mean anything. He did not want all idle
women killed. He did not want all women to
wear skins. He did not really care for tree-
women and he probably never knew a man who
did. Simple sweet natures, such as he imagined
in the time of Homer, such as now abound along
the Congo, wrould on the whole have bored him.
And if the women of his family or acquaintance
had been reduced to any such elementary condition
as his language demanded, he would have been the
first to complain. Not only did this hypocrite
neither seek nor relish any of those tender, meek
Wagogo or Kaya-Kaya simplicities in his con
versation with actual womankind. At bottom he
disliked them.

But I wonder if those conscientious women who
wrote on feminism had gone about their business
in a little more light-hearted way, whether the re-

FEMINIST DEBATE 43

suits would not have been more permanent. At
tacking an institution is not necessarily a gloomy
occupation. On the contrary there is no limit to
the genuine pleasure felt by many abounding writ
ers of our day on finding themselves on a planet
where there is so much to dislike. Had these
writers, bubbling over with the joy of demolition,
been born on a star whose social system suited
them, imagine how cheated they would have felt.
Here, things being in a sad mess, they are happy,
hitting out. But the women writers on feminism
seem to think it follows from the painful nature
of the subject that the style of writing should be
painful too.

I recall, for example, another of them who in
a vigorous volume on the sex relations established
the fact that men and women in this world are as a
rule very badly mismated and then made some
reasonable guesses as to the cause and some reason
able suggestions as to improvement. It was a solid
piece of work, written from the point of view com
monly regarded as pernicious, that is to say, with
an open mind toward social experiment. It was
not a book for the mentally sheltered classes. One
could not, for example, have discussed it with one's
aunt, and one would hardly have wished to show
it to a United States Senator, but it was an honest,
independent endeavor to systematize ideas that
had been in the air for fifty years or so. The

44 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

chief objection to it as a controversial treatise was
that it was steeped in gloom and clogged by the
jargon of the social sciences. Contemplation of
the horrors of wedlock and the horrors of celibacy,
the woes of all who are wrongly mated or too
much mated or not mated enough, had lowered the
writer's vitality. As she walked the streets of a
bright afternoon she was weighed down by
thoughts like these.

There is hardly one person in a hundred of those who
bear the name of human, devoid of some obscure, in
calculable stigma, from which every anti-social growth
may proliferate like a cancer and endanger the very
foundation of human society.

This weakened her as a combatant. She went
heavily into the fray encumbered by sociological
and biological terms. She never let an obvious
thing get by her unsaid and she hated a simple
way of putting it. In highly complicated language
she argued that although marriage was an inherit
ance from ape-like pre-human ancestors, it did not
follow that married people nowadays need all be
have like apes. Language like this has retarded
the woman movement. Language like this would
probably have retarded any movement. The
writers, of course, were not primarily to blame for
it, because the books they had been reading were
just as bad or worse.

FEMINIST DEBATE 45

Peel almost any page of sociology and you will
find little commonplaces that were long since ban
ished from intelligent conversation. As a woman,
this writer if she met you face to face, would
never think of telling you that you are not obliged
to behave exactly like a monkey or that for several
reasons you may be justly proud of European civil
ization, or that an institution when superfluous
will often pass away, but as a feminist she can do
so without turning a hair. The other eminent
apostle of the cause would probably think twice
at the dinner-table before remarking that woman
ought to advance in morality and intelligence
while observing the outward decencies. Dinners
are often very dull, but I doubt if even at the
most fashionable you could successfully make this
remark to the woman you took in. But as a fem
inist you can carry it off with a high hand.

Social philosophies have to bluster in this
large language in order to conceal the smallness
of the personal basis on which they rest; and
when in the sex-conflict the two sides pelt each
other with universals, it is because they are
ashamed to mention the rather small particulars.
A hominist, for example, will often seem to wish
to save the world from an invasion of unsexed
Amazons when he is merely fleeing from some
single female relative. The feminists reply in the
same manner, damning some tiresome man by

46 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION,

everything that they can find in text-books of
sociology, biology, and anthropology.

If hominist and feminist ever squabbled in real
life after their fashion in the printed page one
might be overhearing some day on the train some
such conversation as this :

HE : My dear, you are quite wrong about the children's
school. You do all your thinking in henids. There is a
half-criminaloid in every normal woman and you seem
particularly normal to-day.

SHE: I might have known you wouldn't understand it,
George. How could you? Sprung from a germ-cell
that has fused itself with the larger, self-contained organ
ism, the ovulum, you'd naturally take a narrow point of
view. I don't like to say it, George, but you have always
been acratic. And I have never known the time when
your whole personality was not absolutely determined by
teleological sex characteristics. I ought not to have
brought up the subject of the children's education again,
but I did hope that this time you might be able to control
that little tendency toward subjective fetichism, and —

HE: Their school is plenty good enough and you'd see
it yourself if your psycho-physical constitution enabled
you to overstep the limits fixed by femininity, but the
female ever hates analysis. Never by any chance in your
discussions with me can you grasp the simple notion that
the significance of woman is Man. The female's peculiar
characteristic, as Havelock Ellis says, has always been her
nervous irritability, and you drive me almost —

SHE: Havelock Ellis.1 Why drag in that man? Do

FEMINIST DEBATE 47

you consider him an ilfastric person? The children aren't
getting on in their studies one bit and they aren't making
the right sort of friends either, whereas Fanny says at
the Butler School — but why expect the children's welfare
to interest you? As Woman I am quite accustomed to
your point of view. Among the Bobi the father always
ate his eldest-born. The children of the Bangu-Zigzags,
torn from their mother at the age of two, are made to
sleep in trees. The ancient Foot father on the island of
Zab slashed the cheek of each of his daughters with a
pointed rock dipped in the juice of the toto-berry. Among
the Khai-muk, Teh-ta, Thlinket, Mendi, Jabim, Loanga
Bantu — but what's the use? You come by it all so
honestly.

PLEASURES OF ANXIETY

What with the tango and the slit skirt, eugenics
and the pest of women's thinking, the growing
impudence of the poor, the incorrect conversion
of certain negro tribes, and the sudden appear
ance of a rather strong article on feminism, civil
ization in this country, and perhaps everywhere,
was drawing to its close in many a serious maga
zine article, some years ago. I made rather a
conscientious survey of the matter at that time,
and I recall to this day some of the shocking par
ticulars. Down goes the dike, said one; and it
seems to have been the only dike that could have
prevented "our civilization from being engulfed
in an overwhelming flood of riches, and from sink
ing in an orgy of brutality." Now that religion
has gone, said another, uthe old-fashioned prin
ciples of right and wrong have also largely dis
appeared." Turning a few pages, I found the
"ulcer in our new morality;" a few more, and I
saw the "canker at the root of education." Then
I learned how low this nation was rated by a
connoisseur of all the nations of the globe. "Of
all the countries I have ever met," said he, as his

48

PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 49

mind reverted along the parallels of latitude to
the thirty-seven populations he had intimately
known, "this country, to speak candidly is the
least desirable;" and so he cast off the country
as one who throws away a bad cigar.

And consider society's danger from astrologers.
Abolish astrologers at once, said another con
tributor, and also spiritualists and quacks and
prophets; for if we do not, all clean culture will
soon rot and vanish, killed by the germs from
this "cultural underworld." There were dozens
of bodings just as dark as these in other numbers.
But there was always a consolation.

When perils came out in the new numbers, it
quieted one to turn to the old perils in the bound
volumes of the file — yellow perils, black, white,
brown, and red ones, horrors of house-flies and
suffragettes, and all the evil kind of micrococcus,
back to imperialism and the bicycle skirt of fifteen
years before, and to read, say, of Carrie Nation
ravaging Kansas, and the California lady who
used to hurl college professors through the win
dows, thus destroying academic liberty, and Mc-
Kinley "blood-guilty" and sitting on a "throne,"
and Thanksgiving day changed to Shame day or
the Devil's own day by some Boston contributors,
and the Stars and Stripes painted black and "re
placed by the skull and cross-bones," and blood
shed in fiction, and hazing at West Point, and the

50 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

United States government "shaking Porto Rico
over hell." And every time saved by a miracle —
the same old family miracle !

I could not deny that civilization was then in
danger, but it did seem to me that in any serious
magazine it always must be in danger. And it
so happened at that time that every writer was
spared all anxiety about any actual danger. The
one thing not noticed on any of the quaking pages
I have mentioned was the shadow of the great
war, which was then approaching.

The contributor of a peril to a magazine is not,
as a rule, an unhappy person. On the contrary,
he is often a large, calm man, with a good appe
tite, and more cheerful in his mind than we. If
one could feel toward any menace to humanity
as one used to feel toward tales of Jack the Giant
Killer, just believing enough for a little goose-
flesh, there would be more fun in it. Any man
who is about half convinced that he and a few
others are the sole remaining friends of civiliza
tion finds some dramatic zest in life. It is a mis
take to assume that men who earn their living by
anxiety are at all anxious in their private lives.

And it is the same way with all great political
despairs in private conversation. The most de
pressing talkers you ever meet are not themselves
personally at all depressed. On the contrary, they
are, at bottom, rather gay persons. The hopeless-

PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 5 1

ness of the situation really adds, for the purposes
of conversation, to its charm, by absolving from
the need of any personal effort other than the pre
sumably agreeable one of talking. In middle aged
conversation there is always a certain cosiness in
political despair, and the thought of a large gen
eral disaster coming on has, at any rate, one
bright side in the way it warms up elderly con-
versers. I do not mean to deny that the disaster
may exist even when it is talked about. I merely
mean that if a disaster did not exist it would be
necessary to invent it.

For some time past in common with certain
other fellow-beings, I have read the more or less
radical journals with greater interest than the
other kind. What is worse, I enjoy various
eccentric and perhaps fanatical or one-idea'd peri
odicals more than I do those of sober cast and
steady habits and institutional point of view. I
confess a strong distaste, probably a vulgar one,
for all that class of periodicals which no gentle
man's library used to be without. In America I
have found more pleasure in periodicals, which
would be reckoned by the safe person as unsafe,
than I have in the daily journalism of broadly
based opinion on the one hand or the monthly
journalism of no opinion at all on the other hand.
I mean literally pleasure, for in this preference
I have not primarily my country's good in mind,

52 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

or the future of civilization, or my own or any
body else's moral safety. I suppose I share these
peculiar and ill-regulated tastes with about six
million persons in the English-speaking world.
We are considered a small band, and dangerous,
for some reason, though the thing that most often
strikes me is how numerous we are and how mild.

Nevertheless it is a minority and most people
that I know, for my acquaintances are mainly
among the majority, do not find pleasure in this
type of journalism, and they too profess to regard
it as dangerous. In this for the most part I be
lieve they are hypocrites — not of course in their
expression of a lack of pleasure but in the reasons
they give for it.

I deny that their dislike is born of any sense
of civic danger. It is the product of ennui. Peo
ple will run, and always have run, grave risks to
existing institutions so long as they are amused.
When they are not amused they express alarm for
the safety of the institutions. It is simply their
emphatic way of saying that they are not amused.
Thus you will often hear a man say of a certain
periodical that it ought to be suppressed, its editor
hanged, all its contributors tarred and feathered,
and the premises fumigated by the health board,
and then add casually that he has picked it up
from time to time and simply could not read a
word of it. Or you will see an elderly club mem-

PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 53

her so incensed by some article on birth control
(hard enough, Heaven knows, for any one to
keep his mind on, but not remarkable in any
other way) as to be hardly capable of coherent
speech, and find him five minutes later with all
the pornographic French weeklies on his lap,
soothed again and beaming, as if reassured after
all in regard to the bloom of innocence that he
had almost feared was passing from the world.
Not that I pretend to know which is the better for
him — the awful Anglo-Saxon solemnity of the
article on birth control or the unconquerable hil-
ariousness of certain French minds on subjects
more or less akin to it. But neither does he know
and he simply does not care. For the rule here
applies as it does to a large part of current criti
cism that distaste sounds more emphatic when ex
pressed as moral disapproval. With most of us
the moral counterblast is nothing more than the
angry rendering of a yawn.

For one person who is repelled by the views
of the sort of periodicals I have mentioned there
are a hundred persons repelled by the manner of
presenting them, and their objections to that man
ner, so far as I have heard them expressed, seem
to boil down to two main grievances : In the first
place an apparent desire on the part of the writers
to conceal their thoughts, and in the second place,
and what is more important, a degree and con-

54 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

tinuity of seriousness, unattainable, even on the
assumption that its attainment is desirable, by any
person in the outside world.

I believe there is a basis for both charges. Con
cealment of thought, however, — vindictive though
it often seems — is, as a rule, involuntary. Social
studies are commonly the cause of this defect, — or
courses taken during impressionable years at
American schools of political science where any
lucid way of putting things is always hated, if it
is known at all.

As to the sort of seriousness of which readers
complain I confess I sometimes cannot see the
excuse for it. The radical mind seems never to
permit itself an instant's respite from its cares.
At least I have never happened to meet one of
them in print when it was taking it. Pen in hand
there seems only one of two things for it to do:
Either to tell people how they ought to act or
blame them for not doing so.

It is invariably harassed by the cares of a sort
of gigantic paternity, and it slumbers not nor
sleeps. If it did its watching only over Israel it
might lead, comparatively speaking, rather a jolly
life; but take its duty to Asia for example. Asia
is, to you or me, for comfortable intervals at
least, only a distant continent on the map. Asia
is never for a moment anything of the sort to a
man of these responsibilities. Asia to him is as

PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 55

a little child constantly running some hairbreadth
escape. Russia, says he, is not only the acid test
of diplomacy; it is the acid test of intelligence.
Now of course that is perfectly true, but if you
follow him carefully and far enough you will
observe that Africa also is an acid test and
so is South America. You will observe also that
sex, woman, Bolshevism, Shantung, war babies,
North Dakota, feeble-mindedness of peace com
missioners, Ireland's wrongs, syndicalism, the rail
way bill, Poland, classicism, ultra-realism, or any
thing else he may have thought about, supplies
the acid test of what to think; anl that, as the
months pass by, he has gradually narrowed the
area of permissible thinking, that is to say the
zone of opinion conforming to his own, first to a
strip, then to a long line, zigzag and perilous, so
narrow that two can scarcely walk abreast on it,
and then if they should chance to fall to quarreling
one would inevitably be lost.

Now if you will turn back six months on the
track of this serious person — a thing that appar
ently the serious person never does — you will
find half a dozen questions reported as about to
flame, which, somehow, never flamed at all; and
you will find a score of problems which if not
solved at that particular instant were to have
brought us to the verge of the abyss but which
have not been solved since then and seem to have

56 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

been forgotten even by the writer — along with
the abyss. In short, a six months' retrospect of
him seems to reveal something seriously amiss
with his seriousness. It would seem, after all,
that some of the responsibilities were needlessly
incurred, or that there were well earned intervals
of moral repose of which he might have taken ad
vantage.

A special and temporary reason for it in this
country may have been a too close relation with
the universities. There has often been an inter
locking of college and editorial faculties to an ex
tent most discouraging to an adult general reader
who prefers not to continue to be taught — or at
least not taught as in a university from which
he was probably glad to escape. College and
editorial chairs have often got so mixed up that
a writer forgot which he was sitting in; hence,
floods of didacticism were poured upon the pub
lic that were really intended for Sociology B. And
as to chairs of English literature they were notori
ously wheeled chairs, all of them, and likely to
turn up at any time in serious journalism, for
when a man once firmly settled down in one of
them, he never got out, and even after resignation
would be rolled about in it all through life, rolled
generally into some editorial office.

But any one at all familiar with the pen-habits
of Americans ought to know that the sort of per-

PLEASURES OF ANXIETY 57

sons he thinks he is meeting in these serious pages
do not exist. He will not mistake the heavy hand
for the heavy heart and he will not imagine that
those anxieties, running all the way from babies'
milk to the state of Europe in the twenty-fifth cen
tury are really felt. He will realize the tradition
of serious journalism which demands as a matter
of course that a man s'hall conceal any tremor of
indecision in regard to any subject that comes
along, no matter how tremendous. And he will
not confound a human attitude with a simple mat
ter of conventional technique.

HATING BACKWARDS

So far as I can recall that course in modern
history after these many years, human liberty
was born somewhere in the Thuringian forest.
The precise spot for the moment escapes me, but
the professor knew it, perhaps had visited it. He
was willing to admit that other races had their
missions, not without some value to the world,
but on this one thing he insisted : Had it not been
for that blue-eyed, fairhaired, broad-chested early
Teuton there could have been no political liberty
as we enterprising western people understand
the term. The Latin idea: All authority from
above down — by the grace of God. The Teutonic
idea : All authority from below up by the will of
the people. There you have it in a nutshell — two
irreconcilable ideas whose conflicts and alterna
tions make up the history of modern Europe.
Latin elements in history : The Papacy, Holy Ro
man Empire, divine right of kings, passive resist
ance, Inquisition, Counter-Reformation, every
form of obscurantism, every reactionary move
ment down to the present day. Teutonic ele-

58

HATING BACKWARDS 59

ments: Rise of the Free Cities, Third Estate,
Witenagemot, trial by jury, British Parliament,
representative government, and every popular
revolution, or progressive tendency down to the
present day. In short, if from the point of view
of modern liberal sentiment anything in the world
went wrong there was a Latin devil at the bottom
of it, and if it went right there was always that
early Teuton to be thanked. Nor let us forget
his deep-bosomed spouse, at whose chastity so
many historians have exclaimed with a degree of
astonishment that seems unaccountable, for they
themselves could not have been wholly without ex
perience of chaste women in their lives. But per
haps they believed that chastity also occurred for
the first time somewhere in the Thuringian forest.
Every reasonable American soon grew tired of
this worthy couple and I fancy the Teutonic ex
planation of civilization made very little impres
sion on the minds of our growing youth. But this
sort of nonsense was rather prevalent in those
days. We had formed the habit during many
years, it will be remembered, of shipping to Ger
many hordes of imitative, unimaginative Ameri
can scholars — a wise thing to do if we compelled
them to stay there, but we very foolishly let them
come home again. Hence in my unduly pro
longed academic experience I was forever en
countering unfortunate creatures who had fallen

60 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

betwixt the two stools of civilization, and did not
seriously belong anywhere. A good many of
them served no other purpose than to spread a
sort of German measles in our academic life.
However, most of us made a quick recovery.
There have never been many people in this coun
try who really cared whether the superman of his
tory was a blond or a brunette. I, for example,
am a party man, as passionate political candidates
are fond of saying, but in the remotest epochs of
universal history I have usually rejected my pres
ent party ties. At all events I have always ap
proached the affairs of early German forest life
rather in the spirit of a mugwump, and I have
never cast my vote for any divinity that ran for
the office of historic Providence on an exclusively
Teutonic platform.

On the other hand, during the late war, I
escaped the opposite danger of the anti-Teutonic
interpretation of history of the theory of German
diabolism. I owe this to good luck and not to
any merit of my own. For I have no doubt that
it was only the shortness of the war, after the
entry of my country into it, that saved me from
that same faith in the exclusively German origin
of evil which pervaded the writings of my emi
nent contemporaries. In exhibiting their excesses
here I have no desire to blame them but only to
illustrate the grotesque and unnecessary forms

HATING BACKWARDS 6 1

that patriotism has latterly assumed, particularly
among the learned and literary classes.

All through the war the ablest English and
French publicists, journalists and men of letters
were busily engaged in reducing history to melo
drama with the Teutonic element as the villain
of the piece. The French were especially
thorough in their methods — so thorough indeed
that they went far beyond the capacity of human
detestation. It was not enough to hate all Ger
mans of the present day, it seemed, or even to
hate them through eternity, as M. Paul Bourget
so earnestly advised, but they must be hunted out
at the beginning of their history and hated all
the way down. So back these writers went in
their turn to that same tiresome early German
couple, looking for a prehistoric scandal, and they
found that their forest life was a devilish loose
one at best, and that they lied like thieves even
before they were out of the forest.

As an instance of this irrelevant and almost
superhuman indignation, I will cite the labors of
a widely known French sociologist who set out
to attack the Germans sociologically at the begin
ning of the war, and was about finishing his third
volume when the war ended. As a man, he felt
toward contemporary Germans just as you or I
did during the war. As a man, he was, in com
mon with you and me, so deeply absorbed in the

62 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

Germans under his nose that he did not much
care about the Germans of a thousand years ago.
That is to say, had you proved to him that excel
lent Germans may at one time have existed, say in
the underbrush of that Thuringian forest, quite
early in the Christian era, it would not have al
tered his opinion in the slightest as to the Ger
mans that he saw existing. But, being by some
accident of birth a sociologist, and hence a
stranger to the rude pleasures of our common
speech, he could not say what he liked about the
Germans as he knew them. He had to be as
sociological as he could.

I must grasp them, he said, biologically, ethno-
logically, psychologically, historically, and at
last, synthetically; I must seize not only the
social soul, but the individual soul, omitting no
element, however slight, in their mental, moral,
or material life at any moment of their history.
It seemed rather a dog's life for him to lead, but
he went ahead with it.

He grasped them biologically long before they
were out of the forest, and he fell upon them
phylogenetically the moment they emerged. He
found them, as savages, more savage than other
savages. He gripped them enthnologically about
300 A. D., showing that at that time, as now,
they surpassed all the other races of the world as
liars. He next seized with no light clasp, every

HATING BACKWARDS 63

exposed portion of the German soul he could lay
his hands on down to the close of the middle
ages, during which time they were chiefly en
gaged in resisting the approach of civilization.
The purer the German, the darker the deed,
summed up well enough the middle ages. When
the Germans through no merit of their own had
reached the modern period, he grasped their soul
again ; and he grappled with it anew in Frederick
the Great's reign, when it turned out to be about
the same as it had been hitherto; and then he
made sure that it remained the same for the last
two centuries. In short, the soul of the German
people, as seen any time these last two thousand
years, looked to him for all the world like the
soul of the kaiser, as described in the contem
porary columns of the Allied periodicals. So it
turned out just as he had suspected from the
newspapers before he began to write the book.

Now the German soul to this honest and in
flamed sociologist was nothing whatever but the
spiritual equivalent of a German trench, at that
moment on the soil of France.

The sweep of his soul over the soul of the
German people was tremendous, ranging quite
easily from Velleius Paterculus to Mr. Houston
Chamberlain and back again, but its motive
power was certainly not that of any mere scientific
curiosity, psychological, historical or sociological.
Its flights over German history were merely those

64 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

of an aeroplane, looking for a place to drop a
bomb. To sympathizers with his cause this pur
pose seemed altogether laudable. If all the
sociologists of war-time had been hollow, and
made of the best steel, and if through a well-
directed group of them shells could have been
shot at the rate of 1,600 every minute and
a quarter at a given point in the enemy's lines,
there were a great many of their readers at that
time who would have gladly seen them brought
into action. But when they shot only their own
sociology it was a different matter, for it was not
nearly so dangerous to the foe as we should have
liked to have it, and besides, from the moment
of discharge, it ceased to be sociology. Thus
there resulted a great waste and a misunder
standing all round and not a German was brought
down by their compound adjectives. "As soon as
war was declared there were let loose those mys
tic influences which prepared it and which were
synthesized by the ideal of universal domination."
This was not a sociological explanation of a peo
ple's mental attitude. It was simply a sociologist's
manner of swearing. A plain man in a fight
knows at least that he is fighting, whereas your
sociologist as he blazes away regards himself as
quietly engaged in scientific research.

And why this pious fraud of scientific termin
ology? As a matter of fact this sociologist in

HATING BACKWARDS 65

his laboratory was less scientific in his analysis
of the German soul than a French soldier at
Verdun in war time. He was afraid to note any
exception to this rule, and the poilu at the front
was not. To the broader mind of the po'ihi,
with his calmer sociological outlook, there were
several kinds of Germans. To this scientist
there was only one. The poilu, with scientific
poise and a mind open to inconsistent facts,
knew that he could shoot just as straight even
if acknowledging that there were some decent
Germans in the opposite ranks. This socio
logist believed he could not write straight if he
mentioned a single decent German.

The difficulty with the crowd psychologist
seems to be that he does not allow sufficiently
for the effect of his own crowd on his own psy
chology. In this case the crowd psychologist had
written hundreds of learned pages all to the effect
that it is impossible for any one to escape the
contagion of the crowd. "Not only," said he,
"do men of different races not understand each
other but they have the greatest difficulty in
imagining the possibility of holding a different
view from their own." "The evolution of the
sentiments is independent of our will. No one
can love or hate at pleasure?" "Mental con
tagion affects also the isolated individual." "Race
hatred is as widespread among the savants as

66 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

among the people." "Men of different races
do not understand each other, above all because
the generality of their opinions are all derived
from the suggestions of environment acting upon
the unconscious hereditary elements of which the
characters of the race are formed." He did not,
like an ordinary person refer casually to these
laws. He elaborated them into volumes, like a
sociologist. But not a word did he say about
his own miraculous immunity from their opera
tion.

As a matter of fact he marched on through
this book as in a regiment — psycholigical proposi
tions streaming like banners, sociological laws
beaten like drums, analyzing the German soul as
others would sing a battle hymn and trying to
grasp the history of the Teutonic peoples exactly
where in war time it should be grasped, that is,
by the throat. His psychology emerged just
where his patriotism began, forming a healthy
circle. In short, he gave his crowd psychology
completely over to the service of his country.
It was, in his own opinion, the best thing he had,
and one had, therefore, to applaud him, for
giving it, even while admitting that others had
given much more. But a man of his mettle could
certainly have dispatched the German soul much
better without sociology than with it. It was
foolish to enter the German soul with that quiet

HATING BACKWARDS 67

air of sociological precision instead of with a war-
whoop when it came to the same thing in the end.
War-whoops are more effective and less mis
leading.

It was not from kindness toward any Germans,
however early, that many of us at that time ob
jected to hating them so far back in their history.
It was simply because it seemed to us a tactical
mistake to consume in the pursuit of early Ger
mans a warlike energy which might be put to
some use against the very latest ones. Yet a
large number of the ablest writers during the war
would when confronted with a German criminal
of any kind fall into an absent-minded fury upon
his remotest ancestor. They seemed not to under
stand that nothing they could possibly say against
Alaric the Visigoth would change in the least our
sentiments toward any modern German of our
acquaintance. I never understood at the time
and I do not understand now, why they could
not skip those early Germans. No sooner did
the bombs begin to fall again upon the Rheims
Cathedral than some one wrote a letter to a news
paper about the morals of the Marcomanni, and
if there was a pro-German in the neighborhood
he retorted that according to Tacitus the family
life of the early Germans was very pure. This
brought out a third man with a quotation from
another classic author to the effect that so early

68 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

as the first century A. D. every German was al
ready a scoundrel. And they put this sort of
thing into all their war books. I gathered from
many of these writers that the longer you looked
at an early German the less you would like him,
but I could not guess from any one of them why
it was necessary to look at him at all. If it was
for the nourishment of warlike sentiment — and
that seemed to be the purpose of these authors —
it was surely much better to look at any German
political leader, or at any pan-Germanist pamphlet
or at almost any German Lutheran divine.

When one had for his contemplation an event
so rich in hostile significance as the sinking of the
Lusitania, for instance, it seemed a pity to turn
back and curse the Cimbrians. Suppose Tacitus
was quite wrong in saying that the early Germans
were often chaste and sometimes sober, if that is
what he did say; suppose after immense historical
exertions I could have proven that they were
never sober and seldom chaste; why should I
have bothered people by mentioning it? I did
not deny that the doings of that German forest
married couple, say about the year 50 A. D., might
well have been perfectly scandalous, but I did
'deny that the point was of the slightest belligerent
value to us in our existing frame of mind. Should
we have happened on some Hohen.zollern, for
example, engaged in poisoning a well, it would

HATING BACKWARDS 69

have been no relief to our feelings to hear some
one with a far-off look in his eyes exclaim, "Why,
how like Ariovistus!" — even if it should be estab
lished that Ariovistus had poisoned a well. We
could not at that crisis hate a Quadus of the first
century; we could not even hate an Alemannus of
the second, not because we doubted that they were
detestable, but because we had not the time. Ger
mans of our own day were too engrossing.

One can easily understand that an academic
person, like any one else, should at the very sound
of the word German at that time, have been car
ried away by his feelings, but it does not follow
that he should have been carried so far away as
into the fourth century. A hot tempered man
away off in the fourth century smashing miscel
laneous German objects gave many of us during
the war rather an impression of carelessness, when
there were so many things that needed attention
nearer home.

If it had really seemed that this manner of
writing would bring down the German empire
any sooner, there were several millions of French
sympathizers in this country even in the time of
our neutrality who would gladly have seen it
going on, and some of us would no doubt have
taken a hand in it. I for one, would gladly have
had a fling at Alboin the Langobardus if I had
believed it would aid in taking a single German

70 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

trench. If it would have helped General Joffre
to have us hate the Germans backwards, we
would have burned the Germania of Tacitus, ex
purgated Caesar's Gallic War, and tried to get
Velleius Paterculus into the schools. If it had
seemed necessary to hate them forwards, we
would have founded a society of detestation on
the model of "Souvenez-vous," a French associa
tion already organized, and by means of "books,
pamphlets, albums, placards, lectures, films, pic
tures, class-room manuals, New Year's gifts,
prizes, plays, commemorations, anniversaries, and
pilgrimages," every one of them perfectly odious,
we, too, might have committed ourselves through
all eternity to keeping resentment aglow. But it
was only fair that we should know in advance
why it should be done; and that was a point never
cleared up by any of these eminent writers, dur
ing the war or afterwards.

AFTER THE WAR IN THOMPSONTOWN

I wish to say, at the start, that I see no sin in
the sudden wealth of Thompsontown. I am not
going to denounce the profiteers of that city or
draw any moral lesson from it whatever. I do
not believe that the wealth of its inhabitants, was
in its origin, either moral or immoral, or that it
had anything to do with the relentless working
of any economic law. The people of Thompson-
town became rich by accident. They did not, in
the ordinary sense, make money; they were ex
posed to it and caught it, like a cold. To attribute
the new wealth of Thompsontown to any form
of business activity, lawless or otherwise, is totally
to misconceive the situation. Great droves of
business men became rich through their inactivity;
to have avoided money they would have had to
dodge.

Hat men — I select hat men, because the civili
zation of Thompsontown all came from hats —
hat men did not conspire to raise the price of
hats; nor was there any great, organizing super-
hat-man who amalgamated hats, driving little
hatters to suicide. Hat men made fortunes out

71

72 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

of hats, simply because people insisted on their
doing so. I mean this literally.

I mean that the hat man would have had de
liberately to thwart his customers, if he had not
put up the price of hats. Some hat men did at
first keep down the price of hats, and their cus
tomers scattered all over town looking for the
same hats at higher prices. As wealth increased
in Thompsontown, hat buyers not only preferred
a worse hat at a higher price, but would walk a
mile to get it.

The sort of people who became rich in Thomp
sontown had no personal preference whatever be
tween any two hats when considered simply as
hats, but only when considered as symbols of
opulence. A five-dollar hat gave a five-dollar
feeling and a fifteen-dollar hat gave a fifteen-dol
lar feeling, and so on, and that is all there was to
it. Feeling varied with the price, not price with
the feelings. Feelings varied with the price, the
object purchased remaining the same. Until the
people of Thompsontown learn the prices of
things, they do not know what to think about
them.

Now these thousands of people in Thompson-
town have made money merely because they did
not break off habits which, perhaps, after all, they
could not have broken off. People with shops
in State Street became rich just because they did

AFTER THE WAR 73

not close their shops in State Street. Fortune
favored every dealer just because he did not cease
to deal. They did not seize an opportunity; they
merely waited to be seized by it; and while there
were exceptions, it is safe to say in general that
the new wealth of Thompsontown was the reward
for going where you usually went and sitting
there.

Then came the problem of spending it. They
bought automobiles, of course, two or three at a
time apparently, and they paid sixty dollars for
silk shirts, and forty dollars for shoes, and the
women wore things in the street that made even
them uncomfortable, and State street became in
several ways the equal of Fifth Avenue. You
stood an equally good chance of being killed by
an equally good motor-car, there was as much in
convenience in getting about, and the noises were
almost identical. There was nothing gay or high
flying about it, but you cannot blame them for
that. Spectacular spending has always been exag
gerated and outside print, the madder prodigalities
are hard to find. People who buy ten thousand
dollar tooth picks, do it by stealth. God sees,
and Mr. Upton Sinclair — but not the rest of us.

But nobody seemed to be doing with his money
anything that he particularly wanted to do. No
body ever showed an eccentricity. Nobody could
be said in any sense to be having his fling, and

74 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

while the newly enriched have not the abandon
anywhere that you expect of them, in Thompson-
town they are particularly tied down. Not only
has there never been anything to fling to in Thomp-
sontown, but there have never been the sort of
people who could fling. Monte Cristo would go
in a limousine to the Men's Forum of the Central
Baptists in Thompsontown ; Heliogabalus would
buy a thousand-dollar overcoat; and each would
do it not by way of preliminary indulgence, but
after exhausting every other joy. Double their
fortunes and they would go in two limousines to
the Men's Forum of the Central Baptists and buy
two thousand-dollar overcoats.

And while it was true of everything bought
by the great, new, nonplussed hordes of the sud
denly prosperous, down to shoes, shirts, under
wear, things applicable to the most unimaginative
needs, it was particularly true of things into which
the personal fancy might more freely enter, such
as household furniture, ornament, bric-a-brac.
But personal fancy never did enter. Money came
before desire had emerged, and the joy of getting
was in counting the cost of what you got. To the
ten thousand newly enriched citizens of Thomp
sontown one thing was literally as good as an
other, and divergent prices had to be invented
as the only means of telling things apart.

This had always been something of a difficulty

AFTER THE WAR 75

in Thompsontown and the city itself is really the
result of this embarrassment. People who were
not utterly distracted as to what to do with their
money would never have built it as they did. The
public buildings were all put up for about $500,-
ooo apiece, and for no other imaginable motive.
The richer you got the less you cared what, in an
architectural way, happened to you, so long as
it was a good deal. If a multi-millionaire, you
let them build you anything, provided it was big
enough, and they usually decided on an orphan
asylum with a front door like a valentine.

All Main Street was built up by well-to-do
people who had not the slightest personal inclina
tion as to the sort of places they wanted to live
in. Its domestic architecture is a sincere and ade
quate expression of that frame of mind. There
is not a house in Main Street that does not assert
emphatically the owner's sentiment: What does
it matter where I am? — and there is really no
reason for preferring any house to any other,
aside from the price. Cost in Thompsontown has
always been the true key to the nature of things.

Political economy has not a word of sense to
say to such phenomena as the newly rich of
Thompsontown. What becomes of the law of
supply and demand when applied to the front par
lors of Maple Street? If you charged enough for
bunches of bananas, you would see a bunch of

76 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

bananas in the front window of every house on
Maple Street. You will find anything in a house
on Maple Street, if it costs enough; and that is
the only reason why you find it there. You cannot
account for these things in the manner of econom
ists; it is absurd to suppose that anybody wanted
them.

But, in saying that the new wealth is not the
result of enterprise, I do not mean that Thomp-
sontown is an unenterprising or from a practical
point of view a backward place. On the contrary,
it is famous for its energy. If I were Walt Whit
man I could sing as well in Thompsontown as on
Brooklyn Bridge. I could sing all day of hats
and corset-covers, of shoes, nails, lead pipe, soap,
and gas fixtures, regarded as embodiments of
Thompsontown will-power. Nor do I mean any
thing invidious in respect to progress.

In public spirit, Thompsontown has caught up
to Syracuse, and it has surpassed, I believe Zeno-
bia, Esopus, Rome, Thebes, Ephesus, Priapus,
every city in that part of the State. Community
song, community bath-tubs, community churches;
public teas, talk, and chicken-dinners; welfare
works; public outdoor movements if you want to
go outdoors; public indoor movements if you
want to stay inside; helping hands held out so
thick that it is impossible to slip between them —
there never was a better town to lose a leg in or

AFTER THE WAR 77

in which to be saved from a life of shame.
Thompsontown is filled with public spirit almost
as soon as the spirit is made public, no matter
what the spirit is. A headline carried for eight
days by the better sort of newspapers becomes an
institution there.

No sooner had the new patriotism been in
vented — I mean the kind that would hang Thomas
Jefferson to a sour apple tree — than the clergy of
Thompsontown were solid to a man for the de
portation of anybody that it occurred to anybody
to deport; and the whole town became so safe and
sane that it would have brained an anarchist be
fore it knew he was one. It would be a madman
who complained that Thompsontown did not, in
a public way, keep abreast of things.

But private spirit does seem somewhat lacking
in Thompsontown. Citizens of it are magnificent
in groups, but, detach the individual from his
group and he loses color — like a fish scale. And
the lack of personal differences makes it hard to
imagine a personal preference, and as you meet
rich people singly you lose respect for the rights
of property and the laws of the land. Robbing
them does not seem like robbery; it seems like
rescue; it is impossible to think they desire their
possessions. Pillage seems rather attractive.
You could not hate a Hun who plundered Main
Street; you could only wonder at him. If a bomb

78 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

fell anywhere, it would do a lot of good. That
is the trouble with looking at the new wealth of
Thompsontown ; it makes you a reckless man. It
is impossible to avoid the reflection that even with
a soviet in the City Hall and the whole town liv
ing in phalansteries and the dullest Utopia ever
dreamt of come to pass, there could,, after all, be
no diminution of those personal diversities which
present day society is said to keep alive — varieties
of art and mental interest, individual expression,
fancy, freedom of view, idiosyncrasy — and no
danger at all of the dead level dreaded by the
orthodox. For the personal diversities do not
exist and the level could not be deader.

And freedom of mind, always so hard to
attain in Thompsontown, became impossible after
the war, when the town shook with the fear of
Bolshevism. Indeed, it was dangerous to possess
a mind after the lectures on Bolshevism began in
the People's Athenaeum. I recall one which ran
about as follows:

There was no such thing as Bolshevism in the
sense of a body of social and economic theories
and ideas, said the speaker. The Bolsheviki had
no theories and no ideas, and the only thing that
need be said about their programme was that it
was a programme of crime. They were simply
all murderers, bandits, and degenerates paid by
Germany to plunder and kill. They were ex-

AFTER THE WAR 79

clusively the product of German intrigue. Many
years before the war the Germans said to them
selves, "Let us create the Bolsheviki who will so
weaken the Russian state that we may get control
of it." So they created the Bolsheviki.

After the war, when the Bolsheviki were ap
parently weakening the German state as well as
the Russian, that also was the result of a German
plot. The Germans were pretending to be Bol
shevists in order to frighten the Allies into mak
ing softer terms of peace. Bolshevist uprisings
were arranged in Germany and in some instances
made to look like revolutions. Here and there
people would be massacred or a premier assassin
ated or an alleged Bolshevist hacked to pieces,
but in this the Germans were not serious. They
were only trying to make the Allies think they
were. A German may be sanguinary, said he,
but he is never serious. When they were killing
each other in the streets by the hundreds they
were laughing in their sleeves at the impression
of seriousness they were producing upon other
people. Germans are always up to some such
tricks when they kill each other by the hundreds,
said he. When they were suppressing Bolshevism
in Berlin, they had no objection to Bolshevism.
They were not even thinking about Bolshevism.
They were simply thinking, "What a splendid
hoax on the Allies!" Nor did the setting up and

8o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

pulling down of Soviets arise from any interest in
Soviets. They did not care either one way or the
other about Soviets. The setting up and pulling
down of Soviets was a mere ruse to produce the
impression that Soviets were being set up and
pulled down. Fortunately, the Allies were not
duped by this affection and accordingly the pro
gramme failed.

And now, according to the speaker, began the
huge final German conspiracy which, if not balked,
would sweep from the world every vestige of civil
ization. Germany's plan was to ruin the world
in order to rule it. To do this s-he was about to
engage along with Russia in a campaign of Bol-
shevization in all the nations on the earth. This
would not adhere to a fixed programme but would,
in every country, take the course that soonest led
to chaos, whatever that course might be, and when
chaos was accomplished Germany would at once
help herself to anything she wanted in it. There
was but one remedy. Bolshevism everywhere must
be stamped out instantly by force.

I repeat these too familiar remarks because al
though they had long been matter of journalistic
routine in the respectable press of three countries
their effect on Thompsontown was very inflam
matory, and a tragic consequence was narrowly
escaped. Eager to destroy Bolshevists when there
were no Bolshevists in Thompsontown to destroy,

AFTER THE WAR 81

the patriotic element in the town turned in its
wrath upon old Professor Henderson.

Now it would be impossible to imagine a man
more remote from all the issues that agitated
Thompsontown than old Professor Henderson.
Some ante-natal circumstance had destined him to
Thompsontown and he went on living there out
of sheer absence of mind, obviously irrelevant to
everything in it. As a political philosopher, he had
been known for thirty years outside Thompson-
town for his singular faculty of animating sub
jects commonly put to sleep in American univer
sities. He was also one of the few humane
writers on history during his generation, and
he had actually brought a touch of life to the
minds of other writers of history, which of itself
to any one acquainted with American historians
seemed superhuman. For the rest he was a specu
lative and inquiring sort of person who ap
proached subjects somewhat in the manner of
Socrates, trusting that in these modern days he
would escape the cup of hemlock; and in this
spirit he discussed the fundamentals of political
philosophy, turning patriotism inside out, turning
the virtues upside down, that is to say, doing
everything that people have done in the discussion
of political philosophy, ever since the Greeks be
gan. In short, everybody knew him from his
writings for the sort of man who gave other

82 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

people's intellects something to do and thus kept
other people out of mischief. There might have
been some things in Professor Henderson's writ
ings that would have shocked a policeman, but if
the policeman had read them all through he would
almost certainly have decided not to arrest him.

But he seemed of a sudden dangerous to all the
authorities of Thompsontown. The Eagle-Record
set out in pursuit of him in six leading articles;
and four speeches were made against him at the
Veterans' Lodge. There was a hunt for suspic
ious circumstances, and the suspicious circum
stances were found. They consisted of detached
passages from his books, which sounded rather
sanguinary. It was understood that the prosecut
ing officer was about to move and people said it
would serve the old pro-German right. Four
young men who had spent their war-time in New
Jersey talked of lynching; and the Rev. Madison
Brace, brother-in-law of the millionaire proprietor
of Neuralgia Syrup, referred in his sermon at the
Tabernacle to the "poison of Bolshevism instilled
into the minds of youth under the guise of political
philosophy." Then to the surprise of everybody
the matter was dropped and it leaked out after
wards that all the seditious passages in his books
were found in the Bible or in the Areopagitica of
Milton.

Now, as I write this, immediately after the nar-

AFTER THE WAR 83

row escape of Professor Henderson, I do not find
the situation altogether depressing. On the con
trary I see a chance for the return of a certain
measure of mental liberty to Thompsontown. I
believe that instances of this nature may carry
their own cure even in Thompsontown and that
more steps in this direction will result in some
thing so extreme that it will set free enough plain
sense to sweep it all away. For assume that this
incident had been a trifle more extreme. Suppose,
for example, that some uncommonly vigilant con
stable of conversation employed by our League of
Patriotic Speech had caught Professor Hender
son at something heinous — poisoning a State
Street man's mind, say, by talking about a higher
patriotism — or caught him with the Divine Mon
archy in his hand speculating. Suppose then after
being thrown into jail Professor Henderson is
brought before a judge who is a constant reader
of all the League's publications and a person ex
tremely cautious in his thoughts and the judge
decides, without a crease in the marble solemnity
of his countenance, to sentence Professor Hender
son to five years in chains.

It would not necessarily be a dark moment for
Thompsontown when the chains were fastened on
Professor Henderson. On the contrary, it might
be the dawning of its day. There might begin a
new spirit of understanding and geniality from

84 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

the very moment when Professor Henderson was
thrown into chains. He is so obviously the sort
of person who ought not to be in chains that out
side Thompsontown the sense of incongruity
would be instantly and widely awakened; and
some of the sense might find its way back into
Thompsontown. Wit might sift in through little
cracks in the walls of editorial rooms hitherto
supposed to be altogether thought-proof. Com
mon sense might descend upon the people in waves
upon waves. And with the striking of the chains
from Professor Henderson might come the clear
ing away of the whole nightmare of indiscriminate
and unintelligent repression and some glimmer of
a notion as to who are enemies and who are not
in the world around. Having once reached the
outer limit of burlesque, Thompsontown might
perhaps revert in the direction of reality.

INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION

From hasty and disconnected reading of the
treaty discussion I may have became confused
in mind, and I am not sure that I recall exactly
the names, dates, and other details of a certain
article by an expert in foreign affairs that I re
cently encountered, but I can at least reproduce
the spirit of it. It was on the subject of Lower
Magnesia, with which the writer says every reader
ought to be as familiar as he is with the Banat of
Temesvar.

Now the Lower Magnesians are, he says, of
the purest Jingo-Sloven breed, and for nine hun
dred years they have burned for reunion with
their kinsmen of Mongrelia, from whom, as every
body knows, they were ruthlessly torn by Fred
erick Barbarossa. From that day to this they
have hated the North Germans to a man, and the
duty before the Peace Conference was perfectly
clear. It should either have erected Lower Mag
nesia into an autonomous principality within the
limits of the ancient Duchy or Citrate (that is to
say, between the Bugrug mountains and the river
Mag) , or it should have united it with Mongrelia.

85

86 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

Instead of that it was provided, by articles 131-
422 of the treaty, that the question should be
left to a plebiscite. This gave the Germans their
chance and they did exactly what the writer, know
ing the German character, expected them to do.
They secretly raised an army of 700,000 men
and threw it into coal holes from which it was to
emerge at the moment of the plebiscite, disguised
as Magnesian school-teachers. This was done so
secretly that even now no one among the Allies
has the slightest suspicion of it. The writer him
self knows how secret it was because he has it
on the authority of a secret document, which docu
ment is so S'ecret that its existence is unknown even
to the man who possesses it.

I should like to see set up along with any frag
ment of the League of Nations that may still re
main when these words appear in print, a sort
of clearing-house for international impressions.
Clearing-house may not be quite the word for it,
but it suggests what I believe to be the necessary
limitations of the plan, which would not concern
itself with the correction of impressions but only
with the setting off of one impression against an
other. As the press of each country is at every
moment, contradicting itself, cancellation on a
large scale would inevitably result.

That all writers on foreign affairs are simply
guessing is, I believe, a safe rule to lay down. In-

INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 87

deed they themselves seldom pretend to be doing
anything else, and I have no doubt that the better
sort among them are often shocked by the serious
way in which they are taken by those whom they
seek to entertain. Of course I do not deny that
the dark forces, dangerous undercurrents, and
sinister designs evoked by the writers on foreign
affairs do sometimes actually exist. I simply mean
that their existence ought never to be inferred
from their evocation. Their evocation is constant,
their existence only occasional.

Take, for example, the vast Anglo-Saxon con
spiracy as conceived by a dozen French journal
ists at this moment (thought it may be forgotten
the next moment) and the equally vast French
conspiracy as conceived by a dozen English and
American ones. Dozen for dozen these writers
seem to me, from their manner of writing, almost
equally astute. They all have the same air of
certitude and the same reticence as to the reasons
for it. Dozen for dozen they are evenly matched
so far as I can see, as regards access to those sure
but unmentionable sources of truth, which are
known only to the writer on foreign affairs, and
as regards intimacy with those highly placed and
serious persons, not to be named without violating
a confidence, who though stonily impenetrable to
all the rest of the world, pour out all the secrets
of their bosoms as soon as they learn that the

88 THE * MARGIN OF HESITATION

person they are talking to writes for a newspaper.

In short, I see no reason why these two groups
of expert writers on foreign affairs are not equally
entitled to my confidence.

Nor do I deny that both conspiracies may as a
matter of fact exist. I admit that the American
and British governments, working in the dark,
may have cemented that Anglo-Saxon blood-pact
for the extirpation of all the Latin races in the
world. And I admit that, unseen by any human
eye, the French premier and his commander-in-
chief may have perfected that gigantic plan for
the Gallo-Latin domination of the universe. Das
tardly designs, both of them, I say, and I certainly
have no desire to throw anybody off his guard in
respect to them. But there is one thing I will
not admit about this whole black devilish business
that may be brewing around us under cover of the
night, and that is that any writer in either group,
whose article I have happened to read, really
knows any more about the thing than I do. They
not only do not mention any reason for supposing
that the respective plots exist or any person who
believes in the plot's existence but they do not
even tell you how — whether by dreams, ghosts,
portents, flights of birds, thunder on the left side,
songs of sacred chickens, or hierophancy — they
themselves got a glimmer that the plot does exist.

In other words, they seem to take for granted

INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 89

the plot's existence and then prove in great detail
the horrors of it — which is precisely the opposite
of what any serious person in possession of the
dreadful information would do. He would work
with might and main to prove to other people the
plot's existence and he would then take for granted
their appreciation of its undesirable results. Even
if the world is rent in twain by one or both of
these conspiracies upon the publication of these
words, I shall still insist that none of these writers
had the slightest notion that it would come to pass.
The nonchalance of writers who say they see
a world in flames, would be incredible if they
thought they saw it. No man in private life
would casually say to the surrounding family of
an evening that in well-informed circles on the
second floor he had learned — or that, from au
thorities on the first floor, credibly reported to be
in the confidence of the janitor, he had gathered
— that the upper stories of the building were at
the moment on fire, nor would he, on remarking
the serious nature of the affair, return to the read
ing of his newspaper. These writers would never
shoot a dog in the light spirit in which they damn
a nation. When it comes to the shooting of a
dog, writers are always able to produce some sort
of an excuse. I may add that when the world
does actually burst into flames the writers I have
mentioned are not the ones who notice it

90 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

Now the impartial display of this sort of thing
by the central body to which I have referred would
show, I think, that the suspicion of hostile designs
has as a rule no basis in the public mind, or even
in the writer's, but is a mere matter of journalistic
routine in every country; that of course there are
exceptions but that this is the rule. And then if
it culled from each national press the narrowest
thoughts of its narrowest thinkers, for submission
without remark to the quiet scrutiny of many
lands, who knows that the countries might not be
drawn together out of sheer distaste for the sort
of people who held them apart? The combing out
from each press of all its chauvinists, of all its
imperialists, colonial expansionists, and power-
worshippers, of its glory-talkers and debaters of
prestige, inventors of wounds in the national van
ity, moral idiots of the beau geste, people with
patriotic proud-flesh, Buncombes and Bobadils and
royalists of France, and American manifest-d'estin-
arians, glorifiers of a provincial grudge, exploiters
of a mean and proximate past with no basis in a
true tradition — this mere combing of them out
into common heaps as common nuisances to na
tions^ — who knows that it might not work of itself
some miracle of mutual comprehension?

A progressive writer in his latest volume, on
the world's future, is madder in his dreams of
universal democracy than he was in the volume be-

INTERNATIONAL CANCELLATION 91

fore. The peoples of the earth are all alike every
where, he seems to say, and if you break down
the political dykes that divide them, they will all
flow together in a sea. There are no real moral
frontiers, or religious, ethnic, intellectual, or
economic ones, and there are no real differences
rooted in the past. No nation ought to have a
past peculiar to it, says he; it is a foolish thing
invented by the soothsayers. Nations should have
a common past and listen only to their common
story, and try to forget their own peculiar yarns,
mere family gossip for the most part. Forget
who your father was and try and realize that
your brother is a Calmuck; and if the thing is
done with a good will all round, think of the
warmth of the universal intimacy.

I confess I have not much hope of an early ad
vent of this universal warmth. Even Englishmen,
Frenchmen, and Americans do not look alike to
me, despite the large, impressive, undeniably
cordial and brotherly circumstance that all of
them are bipecfs; and I am no more capable of
surveying them with the super-patriotic eye of this
detached observer than I am of taking the point
of view of an angel flying over them.

But the attitude of this writer seems to me in
one respect mundane and even practical. If peo
ple are not so much alike as he says they are, at
least they are less unlike than anyone would sup-

92 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

pose them to be from the language of the inter
national impressionists; and since these folk are
forever inventing imaginary differences, it seems
worth while, in the interest of international com
ity, to emphasize a point of likeness now and then,
perhaps even to exaggerate it.

Since the international impressionists never have
any reason for their impressions of the respective
nations that they write about, why not follow
the instincts of humanity and be equally well im
pressed by them all? For a moment at least, that
is the logical consequence of reading them. After
reading a sufficient quantity of the language of
international comparisons I am forced for a short
time almost into an attitude of brotherly love,
owing to the lack of proper food for hatred.

THE LESSONS OF LITERARY WAR

LOSSES

Several good British writers apologized during
the war because for one reason or another they
could not keep all their literary work on a war
footing. One of them, for example, author of
a number of agreeable novels in the spirit of
Anthony Trollope, thought it necessary to notice
the complaint of certain critics that his pleasant
story about life in an English country house was
an "anachronism" — presumably because no shells
dropped on it. He tried to reason with these
monomaniacs, arguing that interest in quiet things
is not obsolete even in war time and that a novel
ist may legitimately go on doing the sort of thing
that he thinks he can do the best. It would seem
to a sane person fairly obvious.

Reasonable people at that time were not blam
ing novelists because their writings were not con
cerned immediately with war. On the contrary,
they were rather saddened by the too palpable
effects of the war on the work of many of their
gifted contemporaries. From the point of view
of man power it may have been desirable to get
a novelist into the war, but from the point of

93

94 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

view of literary advantage it was found after
three years' experience that it was often undesir
able to get the war into a novelist. Of course, a
regiment of novelists marching to the front, each
determined to bring down a German, might 'have
been a cheering spectacle, but the sight of those
novelists all marching home, each determined to
bring out at least one war novel and possibly two,
would have been on the whole depressing.

For it was clear to any one who looked into the
matter at all closely that one of the disasters of
the war was the fancied necessity of writing about
it on the part of persons who were manifestly
designed by nature for something else. On read
ing an article by Mr. Kipling, for example, it was
impossible to escape the conclusion that the loss to
letters was far more serious than the damage it
did to the enemy's cause. Fill an author with a
titanic theme and you do not make him titanic;
you often merely burst him ; and one could scarcely
turn the pages of a serious magazine during the
war without stumbling over the ruins of what had
once been a man of letters. The fact that they
had perished nobly did not console me for their
having gone to pieces, nor do I think it unfair to
raise the question now whether they perished
needfully.

Consider, for example, the case of a brilliant
British writer, who, I believe, wrote against the

LITERARY WAR LOSSES 95

Germans about once a week after the war began
and was unable to break the habit off till two
years after the war had ended. He acquired the
ability of hating the Germans all through the
Middle Ages. He could hate all of Prussia from
the earliest times down to the present moment,
and all the Teutonic Knights, and every minute
in the life of each Elector of Brandenburg. If
shells were bursting on the women of his neigh
borhood, he would attack at once and with the
utmost fury the character of Frederick the Great,
and in the course of the same article in his London
weekly paper he would find time also for an un
favorable mention of the writings of Walter von
der Vogelweide. Now, his feeling toward the
Germans was precisely my own and that of almost
every one I knew, and I need not say that any
havoc he may have wrought among the Germans
was welcome to me. I did not wish to see the
Germans escape from this agreeable writer. But
I should have liked to see him escape from the
Germans if it had been compatible with the public
interest, and I raise the question whether, if he
had done so from time to time, many of them
would after all have really got away. For, natur
ally enough, in writing constantly upon so mo
notonous a subject as the moral defects of this
morally primitive people this writer fell into a
sort of rudimentary routine. It was impossible

96 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

to write against the German morals as we knew
them without being rudimentary, for you were
addressing them, so to speak, from the threshold
of civilized life. It was as if you were contem
plating the original ape-man in circumstances so
acute that even an anthropological interest in him
was, for the moment, impossible.

The Germans as we understood them at that
moment were not a subject around which the im
agination of a civilized man really cared to play.
As the daily news of pillage, rape, assassination,
and mendacity arrived, (and no exceptions to
these rules were ever published) curiosity about
them was soon sated and interest in them, though
for the moment keen, was of so elementary a nat
ure as hardly to admit of a varied literary ex
pression. A rather coarse cartoon was a suffici
ently delicate reply to the most subtle diplomatic
language of a German statesman. In short, the
entire situation from the moral point of view was,
one may say, extremely crude.

So it happened that the monotonous succession
of barbarities by which this morally backward
people made its presence felt each week evoked
from this writer each week a monotonous succes
sion of ejaculatory moral sounds, which were no
doubt suited to the nature of the subject, but
which, I believe, could have been just as compet
ently rendered by a large number of persons, not

LITERARY WAR LOSSES 97

one of whom could do certain valuable other
things which this writer was capable of doing.
And therein lay the waste. Of course he acquired
great facility. Waked up suddenly out of a sound
sleep, he could begin instantly, "Another brutal

aspect of the burning of babies alive is " and

finish the article almost mechanically. But I be
lieve almost any one could have been trained to
find the brutal aspects of the burning of babies
alive.

Let us suppose the Germans had taken another
backward step — a step not difficult to imagine, and
one that they might have taken had the general
staff thought it desirable. Suppose that proceed
ing logically from the idea attributed to the Kaiser
that "For me humanity is bounded by the Vosges,"
they had actually regarded all people to the west
of the Vosges, in common with other animals, as
material for food and that cannibalism among
them became as well established and as customary
a thing in our estimation as, say, the murder of a
woman or a child.

The fact that the Germans ate their prisoners,
let us say, received among the Allied nations all
the attention that such a subject naturally would
deserve. Imagine it displayed everywhere on
posters, noted in state messages, recorded in
minute detail in the daily press, and assuming its
proportionate share in ordinary conversation —

98 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

in short, taking firm hold of the common mind.
In these circumstances it seems to me doubtful that
any great amount of literary talent need have
been devoted merely to showing that the course
of the Germans was objectionable.

The case against cannibalism need not have
been made out with any great skill and could
have been safely left to much more commonplace
persons than Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Professor
Gilbert Murray, Maurice Donnay, M. Albert
Capus, M. Pierre Loti, and many other essayists,
novelists, playwrights, and scholars whose person
alities during the war were not to be distinguished
from any other portion of the newspaper. Sir
Gilbert Parker need not have sent me and every
one else in my office building a handsome, care
fully prepared pamphlet answering the Hin-
denburg-Ludendorff defense of cannibalism on
grounds of military necessity, and Mr. William
Archer would not have had to develop with any
particular ability his reply to the philosophic con
tention of Professor Oswald, Professor Haeckel,
and other leaders of German thought, that the
eating by Teutons of a non-Teutonic race was not
to be considered as cannibalism.

The argument of Count von Reventlow that
cannibalism was the corollary of pan-Germanism,
necessarily involved in the very conception of the
Germanic absorption of inferior races, though ad-

LITERARY WAR LOSSES 99

mittedly logical, would probably not have required
an elaborate reply. And as more of our fellow
citizens found their way to the German sideboard
the less need there would be that the ablest men
of letters of their time should devote their en
ergies to the bald and iterative expression of anti-
cannibal views. I do not mean that they should
not have written against cannibalism if they had
wished to. I merely mean that to judge by an
alogies their longest essays might have been less
effective than the simple publication of a German
bill of fare.

People foresaw in a general way the literary
effects of the war. They knew that it was likely
to devastate light literature in the fighting nations,
but they could not have anticipated the startling
concrete results. They knew, of course, that an
essayist hit by a bomb would cease writing, but
they could have had no idea that the essayists who
were not hit would be so strangely altered when
they went on writing. There was no external scar
on the persons of dozens of eminent writers, who
had presumably remained in perfectly safe places
and suffered none of the privations of war; yet
from the reader's point of view they were hardly
recognizable.

Before the war it was generally supposed that
the effect of a strong feeling upon a light literary
character was on the whole beneficial, and there

ioo THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

are many to this day who argue that the reason
why American light literature is usually so very
light that no one can feel it, is because there are
no strong, high, noble feelings in the writers them
selves. I have heard it suggested that my
friend, Mr. Harold McChamber (whose career
I have sketched in another chapter), had he been
borne aloft on some great tempest of emotion,
would have been George Meredith — or just as
remarkable — and that if the inner life of Profes
sor Woodside were disturbed a modern equiva
lent of Dante's Inferno would emerge.

But what were the results of shaking up dozens
of delightful authors during the war? Simply,
that soon after August 4th, 1914, they became
almost completely unreadable, and have remained
so ever since.

This is not said in an unfriendly spirit. The
cause of these writers was my own; nor do I re
spect them any less as men for their having rather
gone to pieces as writers. Indeed, they may be
regarded as sufferers from internal injuries honor
ably sustained; for the casualties of war are subtle
and various.

The bomb that takes off a private's leg may
render a good poet perfectly useless for several
months. Down went thousands of stout British
seamen in the Battle of Jutland and away went
Mr. Chesterton's commonsense, as he argued with

LITERARY WAR LOSSES,^- ?oi::r,

some equally stricken German that the fight was
not really a German Salamis, but, on the contrary,
a British Waterloo. While lives are nobly lost at
the front, wits are lost as -nobly in the magazines,
and after a battle there are almost as many mis
carriages among verse writers as among mothers.

To the right-feeling reader, the foolish thing
he encountered in war time on die formerly in
telligent page seemed a sort of literary lesion,
patriotically incurred. But he was under no
obligation whatever to go on reading the page.
The healthy inner violence of the writers did not
take an adequate outward form, and the fact that
their hearts were eminently in the right place,
afforded a moral, not a literary gratification. It
showed how vain are the current recipes for the
amelioriation of belles-lettres. Passion and a high
purpose, and freedom from the least taint of com
mercialism, a great subject and a stirring time —
all the ingredients recommended by American
magazine critics for twenty years in the recon
struction of the world's literature — went to the
making of the very worst volumes that these au
thors had as yet achieved.

Scorn has been highly valued as a literary mo
tive, but the sco-rn of the satirist was no longer
beautiful in the contempt and anger of his lip,
and when he dipped his pen in gall — a proceeding
much esteemed by literary commentators — the gall

102. THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

turned out to be the very thinnest of writing fluids.
Consecrate a litterateur and to your astonishment
you cannot read him. Put him in a battle mood
and he gives you nothing to think about, no ex
ploding thought of any use whatever, except per
haps to throw at some enemy whom probably it
will not hurt. The lesson of the war seems to be
adverse to all the current theories of inspiration
in literature. If you inspire light literature too
much, apparently, there is merely a blow-out.

This, by the way, must dishearten the group of
critics and novelists who, at intervals these past
twenty years, have been telling other critics and
novelists what is the matter with them. The
amount of disagreeable contemporary reading
these devoted men have forced themselves to do for
this purpose is prodigious. One of them 'said that
after 'having gone through all the contemporary
writings of France, Russia and Germany, and
found them rather bad, he read everything at all
tiresome in America, and found it worse yet. An
other not only knows the exact difference between
Mr. Harold McChamber and Mr. Curtis Lane —
which of itself is rather a subtle matter — but he
can tell to a dot why and how much they both fall
short of genius.

Mr. Barton Worcester says the novels of Mr.
Harold McChamber are "shams;" mere "puddles
of words," "stale, distorted" and full of "mil-

LITERARY WAR LOSSES 103

dewed pap," but he can pass the stiffest sort of
examination in them all, and will quote you page
after page of the longest, evidently having learned
them by heart. He knows why Mr. Harold Mc-
Chamber is so much worse than Mrs. Pauline
McHenry Donald — he even knows why each of
them exists — and he has solved a hundred other
just such knotty problems. You cannot help ad
miring these conscientious, indefatigable men,
going on and on against their wills, borrowing
novels from the cook; following up the elevator
boy and becoming learned in the subject of his
literary contemplations. But you cannot help
rather pitying them.

Now, the result of all this hard labor and liter
ary anguish may be summed up quite simply. The
faults of American writings, according to these
critics, all arise from the lack of proper motives
in the writer. They do not say it in so many
words, but they plainly imply a genuine belief that
if they could substitute some of their own better
moral and artistic purposes for the present motives
of any novelist, however silly, that novelist would
soon become quite sensible.

One critic is certain that if the American novel
ist would stop caring so much about old women
and little boys he would surely be considered a
much better artist.

A second critic believes that if authors would

104 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

be less anxious to appear orthodox and cease con
spiring to suppress all mention of the sexual re
lation they would improve. A third critic thinks
inner freedom is the certain cure. And one thing
follows from the arguments of all of them as
absolutely certain: Extract the commercial mo
tive from any author, however bad, and he will
be bettered.

There is not the slightest foundation for any
one of these beliefs, as the lesson of the war re
minds us. Too many gifted authors were, with a
lofty purpose for a splendid cause, writing com
plete nonsense. Too plain was it, even among
writers at one time quite remarkable, that moral
exaltation is often followed by literary decay. As
to the harmless, ordinary American author, over
whom the critics above cited have toiled so hard,
there is no help for him from their methods. On
the contrary, if they had their way with him, they
would simply make him uncomfortable without
benefiting the reading public in the least. Why
free the inner life of Mr. Harold McChamber,
when in all aesthetic probability none of it could
escape? Suppose Mr. Harold McChamber gave
himself up utterly to Mr. Worcester; went to a
lonely place with him and listened every day, and
Mr. Worcester really interested him in Shake
speare or Mr. Ezra Pound, and tugged and
heaved him toward the higher plane, Mr. Me-

LITERARY WAR LOSSES 105

Chamber in no wise resisting; suppose finally that
the white flame of Mr. Worcester actually passed
over into Mr. McChamber. Mr. McChamber's
artistic substance being the same, there would be
no change in his manner of writing, and the small,
discerning class of readers whom Mr. Worcester
has in mind would probably never know that Mr.
McChamber was burning bright inside. It simply
would cost Mr. McChamber five million readers
and fill him with a violent emotion which he lacked
completely the ability to express.

In fact, it is a rash man who in view of the
lesson of the war, will recommend any definite
external or internal crisis for the amelioration of
any author — good or bad. The most agreeable
authors of die time went monotonously insane un
der conditions which, on the principle of a great
body of current literary comment should have im
proved them.

ON BEHALF OF MR. HAROLD MC-
CHAMBER

In those exalted circles where the condition of
American popular novelists is regarded wieh grave
concern, it is assumed that certain of them have
stooped to conquer. It is assumed that they were
at one time capable of a higher class of work but
deliberately turned away from it to pander to
the public. It would almost seem from some of
these articles that the novelist before becoming
popular has a battle with his conscience, saying to
himself in so many words, "Shall I pander?" and
then after a brief struggle answering "Yea."
Then he sells one 'hundred thousand copies and
is lost to Art.

I have sometimes become quite sentimental
about him on reading these articles for it would
appear from them that the poor creature really
knows how low he is and must suffer a good deal
from remorse, even while outwardly cheerful.
Yet the situation cannot be so bad as that. Indeed
there is evidence that the situation does not exist
at all, outside the minds of these critics. Let us
take the following instance, for which a parallel
can be found by any one who looks for it :

106

HAROLD McCHAMBER 107

Mr. Harold W. McCh amber, of stout com
mercial stock crossed now and then with a Baptist
clergyman, was born at South Bend, Indiana, in
1873, graduated at Cornell University, wrote for
no matter what newspaper and no matter where,
and achieved his first literary success, a very mod
est one, some twenty years ago, witJh the publica
tion of Sally of the Bogs. This was an intensive
study in ashen grey realism, which won immedi
ately a succes dy estime for the extraordinary ver
acity of its local color. Not one serious reviewer
failed to remark on its "atmosphere" or to say
that it was "convincing" or to discern unmistak
able "signs of promise" in the author.

Miss Edna Ladell in the New York Times
Saturday Supplement after saying that it at once
made her "sit up" declared: "The reality of it
all grips, compels, fascinates, overmasters.
Everywhere the great devouring, permeating, ob
sessing bog. You see it, smell it, taste it. Every
where the suck of the mud, the splash of the frog,
the cry of the bittern, the glint of twilight on the
pools, blackened stumps, moss, dank leaves,
turtles, the smell of decaying roots and wet shoe-
leather. And the lives of the simple characters
are bog-driven, bog-confined. With supreme
artistry he has given us an actual slice of raw drip
ping, oozy bog-life. A veritable masterpiece."

Except for a writer in the New York Sun who

io& THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

called it an "unpleasant story of mud and rheuma
tism" almost every other reviewer seemed grate
ful for the way it brought the bog home to him;
and the late Mr. W. D. Howells in a cordial let
ter to the author said that as an authentic por
trayal of an Indiana bog community it was un
paralleled in American fiction. He compared it to
Miss Edith Bamborough's picture of mid-Tennes
see mill-town life, to Mrs. Buxby's powerful grasp
of the southern Georgia sand-hill country, to Miss
Amy Barton's mastery of northwestern Connecti
cut upland farm society, and to Mr. John D. Pott's
remarkable realization of the atmosphere of the
Erie Canal. He applauded Mr. McChamber's
courageous break with the cheap traditions of con
ventional romance, and urged him to continue
as he had begun, saying in conclusion, " You
have made that little corner of the land your

own."

Mr. McChamber did not, as is well known, con
tinue as he had begun, but on the contrary within
less than two years produced one of the six best-
selling historical novels of the period and from
that time to this has repeated that success at sur
prisingly short and regular intervals. Also, as is
well known, in gaining this vast new audience he
lost that penetrating old one which had discerned
the beauty of Sally of the Bogs; and henceforth
if serious reviewers noticed him, it was to contrast

HAROLD McCHAMBER 109

his early artistic endeavor with his present com
mercial achievement.

In literary circles his work was soon taken as
typical of those broad, low levels that a discrimin
ating taste will instinctively avoid. When one said
the "Harold McChamber sort of thing," it was
sufficient. Whenever one American writer de
plored in a serious American magazine the in
feriority of all other American writers he almost
always included Harold McChamber's novels
among the things that made him sad, and in every
article in the Atlantic Monthly on the commercial
squalor of contemporary novelists Mr. McCham-
ber's name was on tihe list of those whom money
had depraved.

To read Harold McChamber was equivalent to
saying "pants," tucking a napkin in the collar,
vocalizing sneezes, vocalizing yawns, chewing
gum, naming a child Gwendolen, having a popper
and a mommer and a parlor with the "September
Morn" hanging in it, and a husband who is always
"he," a wife who is always "she," and children
who always are the "little tots" or "kiddies."

Not that the people who read Harold McCham
ber necessarily did these things. On the contrary
a great many of his readers were precisely of the
class that would scorn them the most. But had
their social discernment remained on the same
level as their literary taste, as evidenced by this

i iQ THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

liking for Harold McChamber they would have
done these things and worse.

As to Mr. McChamber these critics would not
admit that he might have fallen by accident to
this low plane of vulgar entertainment, or that by
natural abilities and inclination he might have sim
ply gravitated to it. They clearly implied that
Mr. McChamber had deliberately, guiltily de
scended to it, stopping his ears to the divine voices
that bade him stay on high.

Now Mr. Harold McChamber, whom I may
say, in passing, I have known intimately for many
years, is the last man in the world to have had
any such complication in his inner life. In writing
his books he never passed consciously from a high
plane to a low one, or stifled an artistic impulse or
battled with his higher self or lowered his stand
ard to suit the taste of other people.

The simple truth about Mr. McChamber is that
his own taste and that of an enormous number of
other people turned out to be just alike. He never
had to study the people's demand, because he de
manded what they did. He, too, liked Ruritanias
at the same time that other people liked them
and with real enthusiasm he made one. He, too,
liked to read about a corrupt man who ran for
office, so he made one run.

When people were fond of strong, primitive
heroes in wild places, he, too, was fond of them.

HAROLD McCHAMBER in

He did not in a spirit of low commercial cunning
compound those iron-backed creatures with four
moral qualities and the love of nature in their
souls. The call of the wild really called him also.
And the democratic "urge" really did urge him
when its turn came round, and as soon as religious
unrest appeared in the magazines 'he, too, became
religiously unrestful just in the nick of time.

Knowing Mr. McChamber personally, I deny
absolutely that an attempt on his part to climb
a high and steep artistic acclivity would have had
any advantage whatsoever. It would have re
sulted in dislocation, not ascent. It is not true
that the fidelity of the local color in Sally of the
Bogs made it, from an artistic point of view, re
markable. The only remarkable thing about it
was the thoroughness with whidh the local color
was laid on. Reviewers at that time, hospitable to
good intentions in that field, always mistook pho
tography for description. It was their habit, too,
to find signs of promise. Hardly any of their
coming writers ever came. And that was the best
that even t)his little group could say for him — that
he was coming — whereas within a month after the
publication of Captain Bludstone, Mr. McCharn-
bers received fifteen hundred letters from de
lighted readers who believed he had already come,
and he had a keener pleasure in producing it.

"When I wrote Sally/' he said, "I toiled over

1 1 21 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

it; when I wrote Bludstone I really felt inspired.'1
He said 'he could not get that scene between the
hero and the wounded tiger out of his mind for
days. He considered it as strong as anything he
had ever written, except that one in The Boiling
Fat, where the poor young man, with the square
jaw and the honest grey eyes that seemed to look
you through, faces the powerful president of the
Big Three System and says just what he thinks of
him, knowing that it will cost him his place and
destroy his chance of marrying the president's
daughter — slightly above the middle height, brown
eyes with a glint of gold in them, color that came
and went, tawny hair with a trick of straying over
the tips of the delicate ears, a light carriage as if
poised for flight, and a rippling laugh. In short,
Mr. McChamber has never had to study the arts
of popularity. He has what may be called a rep
resentative nature. I have seen in his morning's
mail after a new novel letters from an ex-President,
two Senators, two relatives of the Vanderbilt fam
ily, five elevator boys, two out of the forty im
mortals in our National Academy, and one brake-
man on the Elevated Railway. And in achieving
this he has never swerved a hair's breadth from
the path of his literary inclinations. His mind
spontaneously contains the very thoughts that
would have been elected to it, had the people
voted on its contents.

SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS

I have never been able to understand the reason
ing of those kind-hearted people who from time
to time recommend, seemingly in all seriousness,
the subsidizing of the deserving poor among
American authors. As a writer my mouth waters
at the thought of it, but I carniot with a clear
conscience urge it. One's humanity would be torn
in two by the problem presented in its application.
To clothe a naked author would be an act of per
sonal kindness; it would also be, very likely, an
act of public cruelty. If, for example, a commit
tee of the Academy of Arts and Letters were to
set out regularly to rescue all the mute, inglorious
Miltons, the result while pleasing to the Miltons
might be exceedingly disagreeable to everybody
else owing to the committee's probable taste in
Miltons. How do these wise men know that a
committee for saving more authors from starva
tion would really be any better for the literary
situation than a committee for causing more au
thors to starve, or that a committee for endowing
authors to continue writing would work out more
desirably than a cormnittee that endowed them to
stop ?

113

1 14 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

I say committee, of course, because we always
carry out by committee anything in which any one
of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.
Alone, after a few trials, one would probably come
to his senses, but in a committee we come to one
another's senses, which is merely a convivial man
ner of going out of our own. It is not that the
plan looks merely to the preservation of an author
as a man. It looks to his continuance as an author.
Mad decisions of this sort could be taken only in
committee.

It is different with other occupations. Toward
bank-clerks, for instance, one could be cooperatively
humane without endangering to any great extent
the mental lives of other people. A "nation-wide"
bank-clerk life-saving service would be no more
invidious or unreasonable than many other civic
bodies now existing, and it might perhaps with
safety go further than simply pulling bank-clerks
out of water and drying them. In might even
take measures to aid them to return to bank-clerk
ing. Even a committee could probably tell not
only whether a bank-clerk ought to live but
whether he ought to be a bank-<rlerk.

But suppose seven novelists, while looking for
a democratic "urge," fall into the Harlem River,
and are drawn out by some committee on the con
servation of deserving fiction. Beyond the work
of complete resuscitation the committee obviously

SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS 115

has no right to go. To restore those novelists
warmed and comforted to their respective fami
lies, without regard to the quality of their literary
work, is defensible on grounds of common human
ity. It pertains to the preservation of human life.
But one step beyond that point, one single measure
for aiding and abetting any or all of them in the
writing of novels would carry the committee into
a subtle and dubious domain requiring fine, far-
seeing discriminations such as no American com
mittee on any subject has ever been known to pos
sess. It pertains to the preservation of a literary
life.

The bodies of those seven novelists, whirling in
the tide underneath the arches of High Bridge,
would be, I admit, a pathetic sight, no matter
what they had written. But only so long as they
were regarded merely as men. If they were re
garded exclusively as novelists and from a strictly
literary point of view, the occasion might be al
most joyous. So little can one say in any long
view of the matter whether their survival as active
novelists would do more good than harm to the
human spirit. One man's life may be dearly pur
chased at the price of ten thousand ennuis. I do
not deny that the committee migiht do literature a
service by hitting once and again on the right
novelist to conserve; but so might a lightming-
stroke by killing the right one. Why add one

1 1 61 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

blind chance to another in the hope of coming out
straight in this ratiher delicate affair?

Or take a case which would seem to me wholly
deserving and in which I ought certainly to sym
pathize with the subsidizing point of view. Hav
ing nearly finished my book on "The Religion of
Inexperience," a constructive work in moral eradi
cation, written with energy and vision, seizing pos
terity's thought by the forelock but transcending
somewhat the mental powers of my contempo
raries, I appear one morning with my six starving
children at the Anne Street Headquarters of the
Rockefeller Committee on Indoor Literary Relief.
It turns out better than I could have hoped. Not
only am I tided over my present difficulties, but
three weeks later there is a meeting of two college
presidents, a professor of sociology, a writer of a
successful novel, an historian, and the director of
a bank, and out of fhe confluence of these six
intellects there comes, as indeed anything might
come, a decision in my favor.

"The Religion of Inexperience" is achieved,
published in four volumes, respectfully considered.
I find people polite and not unwilling to admit
that I may be passing on to posterity. As I have
the reputation of writing over everybody's head,
giants arise from time to time and say they under
stand me and from my own point of view and
that of several others the world has gained a

SUBSIDIZING AUTHORS 1 1 7

great deal. Yet if I apply in an unselfish spirit
the law of literary probabilities the odds seem to
run the other way. The other things I might
have done better are so numerous. At no stage
of the whole affair, for example, has there been
the slightest indication that God did not really
mean me for a plumber or that that was not the
true reason why I almost starved. Had I starved
a little longer, I might in desperation or moved
by some wayward impulse have begun to plumb,
discovered a real passion and talent for the art,
earned my own living by it instead of by puzzling
people to no purpose, and so the ending would
have been much happier all around. Misplace
ments of this sort are always occurring in letters,
and committees do not readjust them.

We seem to be as much at sea in this matter
as they were about 120 A.D., when the critic
cursed the town for keeping alive so many poets
and cursed it again for starving so many of them;
wanted to know how a man could behold the
horses of the chariot of the sun if he had to grub
for a living, and wanted to drive most poets back
to grubbing for a living as soon as he observed
their manner of beholding the horses of the
chariot of the sun; said you ought to fatten poets
to make them sing, and became violently angry
the moment a fat poet began singing; blamed a
rich man for feeding a pet lion instead of sub-

1 1 8J THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

sidizing some author at much less expense, and
was all for feeding the author to the lion on read
ing What he wrote. He wanted authors protected,
but the literary choices made by the protector
almost drove him mad. Juvenal, of course, was
wholly unreasonable, but his state of mind cor
responded quite exactly to the confusion of the
case, and the confusion is still with us. He had
no solution but the lame one that Caesar should
select and subsidize the author, and he had al
ready completely damned the average Caesar.
But Caesar certainly seemed to be just as good
a solution as any of those modern monsters with
five respectable pairs of legs under a round table;
those headless decapods that we call upon nowa
days as committees to do our dubious jobs.

INCORPORATED TASTE

When college commencement coma or old-
alumni-sleeping-sickness stole over the senses at
a meeting of the American Corporation of Let
ters not long ago, the audience had no just grounds
for complaint.

No one of course had a right to expect that a
meeting of so respectable a body would be either
inflammatory or gay, and it may seem invidious
to commemorate it here as an occasion of more
than usual dullness. Yet the pulse and temper
ature of that dignified public body did seem a
little subnormal, even from the standard of digni
fied bodies generally. How could that charming
and impulsive writer so subdue the seductions of
his own mind as to sink for the time being into
an utter presiding officer ? Why need that learned
professor have read a literary paper prepared
presumably by a member of the Sophomore class?
And how could that busy public official contrive
to give so strong an impression that nothing, abso
lutely nothing, was going on inside him?

Grant the necessity of every unimpeachable
sentiment and every platitude. Allow for that

119

120 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

American platform change whereby an individual,
clearly distinguishable in private life from the
social scenery around him, melts, spreads out,
is personally obliterated, coalesces with the homo
geneous mass of leading citizens, irreproachable,
featureless, placid, fluent, explanatory, and null.
Still there are those who whisper that no man
could so completely and for so long a time con
ceal his intellect, if he had one; that an active
mind would surely at some moment kick the cover
ing off. Decorum carried to a certain point breeds
horrid passions in the human breast and the gen
tlest platitude pushed too far may drive men in
the desperation of their ennui to deeds of inhum
anity. That is a peril against which dignified civic
and academic bodies would do well to guard on
such occasons. These scenes of excessive public
calm might breed a violence that would blow a
perfectly innocent, middle-aged gentleman clean
out of the wages of Who's Who?
That was the danger as I saw it and the only
danger. Yet that was not at all the point of view
from which the critics blamed it. This very meet
ing called forth strange rebukes. Some said it
was fastidious, undemocratic; others that it made
vile concessions to the public taste. There was no
coherence in their remarks upon it but there was
as usual an undercurrent of dislike. Whenever
the annual meeting of the Corporation of Letters

INCORPORATED TASTE 1 2 1

comes around there is always an ardent hope that
it will misbehave. The comment of clever out
siders is usually ironical. One is supposed to be
amused every year when someone else refers to
its members as "immortals," and if one can not
annually make the same remark about people who
take themselves too seriously, one must at least
seem to take pleasure in hearing it. People proud
of their sense of humor insist in precisely the
same words each year that there is something
funny about it, and if there is any falling off in
the vivacity of your annual assent, they snub you.

Newspaper reporters attend each meeting of
the Corporation of Letters in the hope that this
time the members will appear in togas with bay
leaves in their hair, or at least in court dress
carrying swords. And although nothing of a
broadly comic nature has ever occurred, the out
ward effect of this infant, and, to my mind, in
nocent institution, is still to set people to winking
at one another once a year, without a word of
explanation as to why they wink.

To be sure, you do hear comments from time to
time on the taste shown by the Corporation in the
selection of its members, but they are not es
pecially significant. People are too familiar with
the casualties of club membership to think that
any group of men can add to their number reason
ably. Strange creatures sift into any club. The

1 2 2 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

best of committees on admissions can no more ex
clude them altogether than the best of housekeep
ers can exclude house flies. There is always a
certain number of club members who have bred
from eggs laid in the walls or under the carpets;
it is impossible that any one should have let them
in on purpose.

Principles, standards, and the intelligence of the
persons who make the choice, are no safeguards
in this perilous domain. Had the nine muses been
obliged, in committee, to nominate a tenth, luck
would have had it that she should turn out an
idiot. No reasonable person can blame the Cor
poration for a certain proportion of mishaps in
membership.

As to the true source of this undercurrent of
hostility, I can only make a guess. I should say
that it springs from the feeling that the Corpora
tion is itself a mistake, rather than that it some
times makes one. The critics seem to think that
any such institution in an English-speaking com
munity would be likely to be made up of merely
leading citizens, and they feel that from the point
of view of everything essential to letters leading
citizens are as a rule injurious. They believe it
would always encourage what is respectable and
never by any chance encourage what is more than
respectable, and that respectability in letters is too
much encouraged as it is. They think that when

INCORPORATED TASTE 123

art or literature achieves anything permanently
desirable it is something that no committee of suc
cessful American citizens would have antecedently
recommended or would be likely to discover after
wards inside of two generations from the date of
its occurrence. To the chaos of public taste they
believe it contributes only an element of pomposity
leaving the chaos just where it was. In short, they
loathe institutionalism in taste, having a horror
not of standards, but of any corporation that
would tell them what they are.

I may not do justice to this point of view be
cause it is not one with which I sympathize, but
I should imagine that the argument of its uphold
ers would run about like this : There are two
classes of literary and artistic workers : the trans-
muters and the transmitters. The transmuters
are those whose minds leave an impression on
what passes through them. They survive by a
force that is elemental and beyond analysis, and
often unpleasant to the most eminent of their con
temporaries. They could no more be a poet
laureate than could Shelley. They could no more
get into an academy than could Flaubert. By
eminent, shining, contemporary civic bodies they
are usually left aside. An academy is an institu
tion for honoring the people who could get along
without it. An academy is always rich in members
of the other type ; that is to say, the transmitters.

124 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

These are the men who leave all things, both in
art and in literature, precisely where they find
them. They are of immediate social value for
purposes of repetition. They are the active, in
dustrious, socially blameless individuals, who write
most of the books that are sold, hold most of
the good positions, are the soonest known, and
the soonest forgotten, being wholly of the sub
stance of tfieir hour and their place, and the ma
jority in every institution.

In society these people may be useful as a bal
last; in art they are always a dead weight. Band
them together and you add one more to the al
ready too large number of organizations for the
suppression of human diversity. Suppose, they
say, an academy had existed at the middle of the
last century. By the time Longfellow was receiv
ing more encouragement than he deserved it would
have encouraged him still more. On the other
hand, it would have discouraged Poe either nega
tively or positively. Very likely there would have
been a fine row with Poe, and another sore spot
carried to the grave by that unhappy mortal.
Take it all in all, an academy organized for the
deliberate purpose of discouraging all that a ma
jority of its members most approved in con
temporary literature would probably work out just
as well as, or better than, the other kind. A
learned body actuated by malevolence towards

INCORPORATED TASTE 125

literature has never been tried. Perhaps it might
accomplish something.

All of which seems rather high-flown and in
consistent with the probable attitude of these
critics in their daily lives. They are probably
themselves members of some humdrum institution
and are not worried lest it crush out brilliant
eccentricity. Such a body has to do with letters,
not as a divine calling, but as a profession wherein
men earn their bread. It has to do with levels,
and is not to blame for guessing wrong on peaks.
People do not blame a university for withholding
the degree of bachelor of arts from anybody but
a prophet. University decisions are as a rule
stupid, and universities muddle along on the whole
usefully. A group of authors is of course a de
pressing sight, authors being too much alike as it
is, but a grouping of authors is no more likely to
snuff out a genius than a genius is to snuff out the
group. It is moreover so analogous to other com
binations that if a man set out to attack it, he
would be involved in too vast a crusade. If one
obeyed an impulse altogether artistic, one would
go up and down the land pillaging.

BARBARIANS AND THE CRITIC

As I remember it, at the Athenian Club that
evening there had been a meeting of our Com
mittee on House Management in which the ques
tion of buying awnings for the north windows
was debated from nine o'clock till half-past ten,
when it was unanimously referred to a sub-com
mittee without power consisting of the chairman,
the treasurer and the secretary, who were to make
recommendations at the next meeting.

Then came supper and after that Mr. Harbing-
ton Dish read a paper on American verse reform
in which, while deprecating the radical views of
certain writers, he insisted fhat the situation was
very serious and that something ought to be done.
I recall only two of his suggestions: First, that
rhymes if retained at all in the new era that was
now upon us should always be at the beginning
and never at the end of the line ; and, second, that
the verse form once popular under the Anglo-
Saxon Heptarchy ought to be revived. There was
much applause, but after it the meeting broke up
rather suddenly, the members slipping away so
quietly that Jarman and I who were seated in the

126

BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 127

two big armchairs by the fire did not realize at
first that we were alone.

"It's the worst thing he ever wrote," Jarman
was saying about a writer of our acquaintance,
"and it's by all odds the most successful — and not
merely in sales, either. You should see his letters,
from people really distinguished, people you'd
never suppose would be taken in by it. And all
that talk about his vision, keen social criticism,
sense of the underlying forces of modern life,
breadth, depth, audacity! Why the whole thing's
nothing but a compilation of the ideas in the air,
without a single individual, distinctive, "

Jarman's feet were on the fender, precisely in
my line of vision and I remember noticing that he
wore tan shoes. I closed my eyes for a few mom
ents and when I opened them again the shoes had
changed to a kind of bath-slippers and as I glanced
up I saw he was now clothed in a thin, white,
sleeveless garment of strange cut.

"Why Jarman, what in the world " said I.

"Mr. Jarman went out ten minutes ago," said
the person in white, in a low-pitched voice, and
at the same time bent forward, revealing a
swarthy wrinkled face, with prominent curved
nose, and dark eyes of extraordinary brilliance —
a man over sixty-five, I should say, lean but vigor
ous.

"May I ask to whom I have the pleasure" —

1 2& THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

said I, edging my chair to a point from which I
could reach the fire-tongs if necessary.

"The man of Aquinum," he said "the Aquinas,
not that upstart Christian dog, Thomas, I believe
you call him. W'hat right has that corruptor of
my own tongue to the name of my own birthplace
when my claim is prior to his by eleven centuries?
But that's the justice of you barbarians to an
honest man of letters. Who was the Aquinas for
a thousand years before the jargon of the tiresome
Thomas was ever read by anybody, I'd like to
know. Just answer me that."

"I am not acquainted in Aquinum," I said, "and
I am sorry to say I know nothing about the
Aquinas family, but perhaps if you mention your
entire name "

"Oh, well," said he, "if your modern thoughts
can travel back any further than last week
Wednesday, perhaps you will recall one D. Junius
Juvenalis."

"Juvenal?" said I. "Why, yes; it was you,
wasn't it, who said children should be treated
with the greatest reverence and then wrote a lot
of things that had to be cut out of every edition
that was likely to fall into the hands of young
people. Oh, and let me see, there was Dr. John
son's poem London and the one on Vanity, and
"Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed" and that
sort of thing. You're in the dictionaries of

BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 129

familiar quotations — nearly half a page. I always
get you mixed up with Oliver Goldsmith, I don't
know why; but I believe people generally do get
you mixed up with somebody else. If you will
pardon my saying so, I think the prevailing im
pression of you at present is rather indistinct,
and still fading perhaps, especially here — the war,
you know, and electricity, aviation, submarines,
motion pictures, breathless progress of the social
sciences, new education, new woman, new poetry,
the referendum and recall, world federation,
eugenics, the rights of labor, and the democratic
push. It seems rather an unfortunate time to
choose for spending your — your outing, if I may
call it that. I should have supposed that Oxford
in 1760, say, would have been about the latest
occasion. In short you will find us, I fear, a

little distrait, forgetful "

"Be quiet for a little while, barbarian, and I
will try to explain. It is precisely because I am not
forgotten that I am here. My name, of course, is
seldom mentioned and I have not heard for fifty
years a correct quotation of any of my words,
but my thoughts go on among you. They go on
damnably. It is not for the pleasure of meeting
them that I am come. Quite the contrary. I am
sent back here in punishment like other poets that
have sinned. Race hatred was my undoing. I
called it my Roman patriotism, and I cursed those

i3Q THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

absurd Hebrews and the 'esurient Greekling' and
those outlandish Egyptians and sneered at the
Gauls and railed at all those ill-bred Eastern fel
lows that overran the town, and I felt quite virtu
ous in doing so. And for helping to perpetuate
the great race lie and the geographical inhumani
ties which are still your curse, I am damned to
revisit my own thoughts as they float about in the
world through the ages, the same old thoughts,
dressed up in barbarous foolish phrases, passed
from one silly mouth to another, turned into tink^
ling rhymes by the worst series of imitators that
ever a man had —

Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru.

Great poetry, that ! That man Johnson had no
word-sense. I never said anything of the sort.
What I said was

Omnibus in terris quae sunt a Gadibus — "

"Wait a minute," said I, "I don't quite — "
"Well, what I said didn't sound in the least like
his pedantic, mincing, repetitious stuff, or Dry-
den's either for that matter, or Chapman's or that
series of Oxford dons. Why can't they let me
alone? That's the curse of my thoughts. They
are never forgotten. Not a day passes without
some one's spinning them out in a literary essay

BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 131

for a magazine all about the discerning few and
the undiscerning rabble or in tedious conversation
at some club, like yours. Take, for instance, the
talk of your critical friend, Jarmanus, what's his
name, about the mean rewards of merit and the
triumph of mediocrity. You'll find the whole of
it in Sat. VII, line 9 to 99 —

Qui nihil expositum soleat deducere, nee qui
Communi feriat — "

"Yes, yes," I interrupted, "but please don't talk
Yiddish or whatever it is. I am a modern New
York man and I agree with our most progressive
educators that any classic sentiment which cannot
be adequately expressed in the English language
is not worth reading. You were saying?'*

"I was merely repeating something I said about
the best selling fiction of my day. I thought I
had put it rather better and more compactly than
your Mr. Jarman did or that man in the Atlantic
Monthly a while ago who spread four sentences
of mine over eight pages, or any of the fifteen
others within the last six months. Is there ever
a moment when commercialism is not being
lamented by your cultured critic of the day, who
in a literary sense is no wise distinguishable from
your cultured critic of the day before? Writing
on this theme, they are as like as the white sow's
litter, and I have to read them all. By the Great
Girl's bow and quiver, by the salsipotent fork, by

132 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

the javelin of the Wise Lady, by the Cirrhaean
spikes, by the boiled head of my own baby served
in Egyptian vinegar, I curse the whole insanable
cacoethical cohort of scriptitating "

"Hold on! What — what's the matter?"

"I was just thinking that I should have to read
in the next number of the Edinburgh Review or
the Nineteenth Century the self-same things, only
ill expressed, that I said to Umbricius at the
Capene arch that evening in the summer, I think,
of 1 20, when he was moving his furniture out of
town. Queer that I who wrote Occidit miseros
crambe repetita "

"There you go again."

"I say it's queer that I of all people should be
condemned throughout all time to stuff myself
with the warmed-over cabbage of my own com
monplace. I didn't mind coming back for Shake
speare when he stole that thing about 'Imperial
Caesar, dead and turned to clay/ but I haven't
had an afternoon in Hades since Matthew Arnold
wrote about Philistines, and nowadays with every
dull person writing about the money-god there is
no rest. Why, once when I 'hoped to pass the
week-end in Hell I was called back to read Mr.
Upton Sinclair on the sin of paying a thousand
dollars for a toothbrush — a matter which I had
settled finally in Sed plures nimia congesta "

"Please don't do that."

BARBARIANS AND THE CRITICS 133

"And what with the constant reappearance of
my ideas on mothers-in-law, the newly rich, suc
cess, waste, s'how, luxury, gambling, graft, the
social climber, divorce, woman from the point of
view of the anti-suffragist, woman as the target
for brightly cynical remarks, alcoholism, prosti
tution, country life, subsidization of authors, high
cost of living and forty other burning modern
questions, it looks as if I should never — . And
the hideous uniformity of your vapid writers in
their common delineation of our thoughts; the
large wastes of identical language. Forty novels
in a row with the thoughts all dating from the
reign of Domitian and all expressed alike. Belles-
lettres produced by machinery. But though the
monotony of the modern manner is terrible, that
is not the worst of it. What I can't stand is the
stench — "

"Stench?" I asked.

"Smell of decaying reputations. Nothing worse
to a fairly immortal nose than the smell of a pass
ing modern reputation. Impossible to stay within
a mile of your national capital, and the literary
people are almost as bad. I tried to drop in on
a group of Imagist poets on my way here just
now, but I nearly fainted."

"I hope," said I, drawing my chair away, "7
haven't been too — "

"Oh, no, not you. That's why I chose you in-

134 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

stead of a celebrity. People without any reputa
tion to decay are comparatively odorless."

At that moment the room turned upside down
and spilled him out of it and I was tossing about
in space till I heard Jarman say, "I've been shak
ing you for fully five minutes. If you want to
catch the 1 132, you'll have to hurry."

REVIEWER'S CRAMP

One would think that the most dogged of fire
side defenders would be satisfied with the moral
purport of a novel that I read some years ago.
Nearly all the characters in it who offend against
the marriage bond — and there are quite a lot of
them — come to a bad end. In fact, in the interest
of literary variety it would seem that sudden
death, delirium, blasted hopes, social perdition,
and the wages of sin in one form or another were
distributed with an almost too perfect moral pre
cision. From the birth of the first illegitimate
infant in an early chapter down to the moment
in the final pages when the last illicit lover has
his skull crushed in, the mills of God are made
to grind in a manner that ought seriously to dis
courage the carnally minded. Yet instantly there
were many commentators who denounced the book
as dis'solute.

One of them said he was shocked by the "de
liberate devotion of such a pen as the author's to
the defiance of the social conventions and ideas
of duty and morality." Another wanted to know
how "parents and guardians can prevent young
people from reading such horrid low class tales."

135

THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

They called it "dangerous" and "depraved."
They said that the author had set out malevolently
to "undermine all respect for marriage and par
enthood."

Why reviewers pick out certain books as dang
erous is one of the mysteries of literary journalism.
You can no more tell what will frighten reviewers
than what a horse will shy at. A reviewer will
pass the same familiar object twenty times and
then of a sudden rear at the sight of it as in the
presence of a monster never before beheld. If
one could gather all the books and plays de
nounced as dangerous in the last twenty years,
what a splendid object lesson it would be in the
inutility of moral apprehension. Even so sensitive
a moral being as a New York City politician prob
ably would not seek to suppress to-day another
"Mrs. Warren's Profession."

Reviewers are of course aware of this when
they stop to think of it. Every reviewer really
knew that all the ideas, situations, and emotions
presented in that novel had been thumbed and
dog-eared in nearly every circulating library for
a generation. For as a matter of fact it was
about the most conventional book that the author
had ever written and it seemed almost a compila
tion from the fiction of our time. The homes
that it could undermine must all have been long
since blasted.

REVIEWER'S CRAMP 137

Perhaps it is due to temporary loss of memory,
whereby one modern novel suddenly looms up to
the reviewer's mind, alone and terrible, devoid of
relation to any other modern novel in the world.
Perhaps if you had forgotten completely what a
modern novelist was like, the sight of one would
be shocking. Even Mr. Harold McChamber
might seem peculiar if encountered by a mind en
tirely blank. Or it may be that certain reviewers
are constrained at intervals to utter moral noises
without regard to the occasion, just as a watch
dog will sometimes bark at a wheelbarrow, not
because there is danger in the wheel-barrow, but
because there is bark in the dog. Perhaps the re
viewers above quoted could not have held in at
that moment no matter what novelist had passed
by and it happened to be this one. Neither he nor
they were really to blame for it. They fidgetted
merely because they felt fidgety and long months
followed in which, with Arnold Bennett up to
something passionate, H. G. Wells at his wicked
est, Bernard S'haw in eruption, new bad words
coming out in each installment of the Oxford
Dictionary, and the air thick with volumes of the
most terribly lucid sexual explanations, they faced
equally grave moral perils with entire composure.
Then just as you were dozing off over some quite
ordinary bedside compound of matrimonial mis
calculations and rebellious hearts, they would ring

1381 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

out the wild alarm again — seized by the same old
unaccountable spasm over the duality of the two
sexes, and the usualness of the usual novel, and
and the contemporaneousness of their contempo
raries.

I believe, however, I can offer a better explana
tion based on my personal experience as a re
viewer. Such seizures as the one above men
tioned and they often take widely different forms,
are the result, I think, of reviewer's cramp.

At all events I myself, after reviewing books
for five years, was obliged to desist on account
of reviewer's cramp. I may say for the enlight
enment of those who are not familiar with the
malady that it is purely mental, having none of
the physical symptoms of the nervous affection
which sometimes jerks a writer's pen-hand in
the air. My hand was not jerked in the air,
but my mind was, and from that time to this
I have never started to write a review that my
mind did not immediately fly away from it and
rivet itself on something else ; and when detached
with difficulty from that particular object it would
rivet itself on another, equally remote from the re
view. It is no mere lack of interest in writing a
review, for that might be overcome— is overcome
daily and hourly — and besides you see reviews
being written everywhere by people who obviously
could have had no interest in writing them. It

REVIEWER'S CRAMP 139

is the passionate interest in something else that
constitutes the gravity of my case — the more so
because the things that then awaken it do not
normally attract me. I have been enchanted for
a long time by an ordinary penwiper from the
moment of starting to write a review. When a
bee has entered the room, although I am not in
the least entomological in my inclinations, I have
become a Fabre.

Recently I gave the thing one more trial, think
ing that after a long interval the condition might
have passed. I took five novels that had enter
tained me and determined to stir them all together
in four or five pleasant pages round the central
notion that, after all, each showed in one way or
another the tendency of the contemporary novel
to be contemporary, in spite of the fact that from
the pages of one you would not know that the war
had existed and from the pages of another you
would see plainly that but for the war the book
would not exist. I should express surprise at a
writer who showed no traces of the war, but I
should admit that he was nevertheless contempo
rary. I read dozens of those articles every month;
I like them; and I started to make one. This
time it was sealing-wax. I rolled six balls of
sealing-wax, making them rounder and rounder.
It is wonderful how round you can make balls of
sealing-wax, if you give your whole soul to it.

140 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

Most reviewers sooner or later have some
form of reviewer's cramp, but the victim of my
form of it is not only permanently disabled; he
is under the illusion of righteousness. He be
lieves he is justified in behaving in that way. Not
only that, but he believes other reviewers ought
to behave as he does. I felt nobler after rolling
those wax balls than I should have felt after writ
ing the review, and so far as I have read the re
views of those novels, I believe almost every
writer if he had applied himself to sealing-wax
instead would be feeling nobler too. For I can
not believe that they meant a word they said or
that they wanted to say it — I mean in regard to
the quality of the books, not of course their mere
outlines of the stories.

I cannot believe, for example, that a man per
haps fifty years of age and a reviewer of novels
by the hundred can become ecstatic often. I be
lieve he will go a whole year at his occupation
without being ecstatic once. I do not believe that
after reading Miss Fanny Wilson's Apple Blos
soms, he meant any one of the following words:
"From her seasoned but joyous throat the old
melody ripples forth fresh and free, full of
delicious whims and sly laughter, reminiscent of
the Vie de Boheme." I insist also that those five
reviewers, each of whom implied that on reading
the The Torment he was shaken like a reed by the

REVIEWER'S CRAMP 141

wind knew perfectly well either that he was not
shaking at all or that he was making himself
shake.

Nothing stood out from the general situation
as they implied that it did in all of these reviews.
In short, these reviewers were subdued to the iron
law of reviewing, and this iron law ordiains that
reviewing shall be the perpetual announcement of
differences that are not perceived and of astonish
ments for good or for evil that are not experi
enced, and that it shall be accompanied by a con
strained silence as to the sense of monotony that
undoubtedly always pervades the reviewer's
bosom. There is stiff compulsion in it. Such
things could not happen in a free and private life.

If, for example, a man in private life had for
one day a puree of beans, and the next day hari
cots verts, and then in daily succession bean soup,
bean salad, butter beans, lima, black, navy, Bos
ton baked, and kidney beans, and then back to
puree and all over again, he would not be in the
relation of the general eater to food or in the
relation of the general reader to books. But he
would be in the relation of the general reviewer
toward novels. He would soon perceive that the
relation was neither normal nor desirable, and he
would take measures, violent if need be, to change
it. He would not say of the haricots verts when
they came round again that they were quite in

i42i THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

the vein of the Fie de Boheme but ever fresh and
free, and he would not say on his navy bean day
that they were as brisk and stirring little beans of
the sea as he could recall in his recent eating. He
would say grimly, Beans again, and he would take
prompt steps to intermit this abominable preces
sion of bean dishes, however diversely they were
contrived.

If change for any reason were impossible — if
owing to a tyrant wife and the presence of a
monomaniac in the kitchen we could imagine him
constrained to an indefinite continuance, — then he
would either conceive a personal hatred toward
all beans that would make him unjust to any bean
however meritorious, or he would acquire a mad
indiscriminateness of acquiescence and any bean
might please. And his judgment would be in
either case an unsafe guide for general eaters.

This I believe is what happens to almost all
reviewers of fiction after a certain time, and it
accounts satisfactorily for various phenomena
that are often attributed to a baser cause. It is
the custom at certain intervals to denounce review
ers for their motives. They are called venal and
they are called cowardly by turns. They are
blamed for having low standards or no standards
at all and for not having the slightest sense of
anything of a permanent value in literature, and
for using the language of the advertising page.

REVIEWER'S CRAMP 143

I think their defects are due chiefly to the nature
of their calling; that they suffer from an occupa
tional disease.

I do not see why they should be blamed for
not applying to their contemporaries a scale based
on the permanent values of literature. They are
not engaged in an occupation that admits of such
a thing. No one in their situation could judge
fairly his contemporaries, even if it be assumed
that contemporaries can ever be fairly judged.
They are wedged in so tight with contemporary
minds that they cannot even get a square look at
them. But they persist in employing words that
imply a permanent value in some merely momen
tary thing and they mislead a general reader,
who, as he is not devouring current fiction in such
quantities as they are, has more space in his
thoughts for perspective. Hence they always
seem in any proportionate view of the thing
profuse and niggardly by turns — arms out to-day
to a Mr. Merrick or a Mr. Walpole, backs turned
perhaps to-morrow on some poor American, just
as good as they, who is naturally thinking, How
about me ? They are to blame rather for misusing
the words of literary criticism. In the circum
stances they should not be used at all. It is a
journalistic subject and requires a journalistic
treatment, but there is such a fidgetting with liter
ary terms that somehow they always mislead you.

THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

It is not speaking ill of fiction of this class to
call it merely journalism, as critics for a genera
tion past have been doing; it is speaking well of
journalism. It has a wider liberty than other
kinds of journalism and a somewhat longer hold,
but it does not last long and what is more, the
makers of it do not expect it to last long. Essen
tially it is on the exact level of dozens of respect
able periodicals, as everybody concerned in it or
about it is aware. Yet reviewers who never speak
of the appearance of the last month's magazines
with any literary emotion, will report almost any
novel as a literary event, or condemn it because
it is not one. It seems as if they might avoid
extremes in the one case as well as in the other.
Surely this situation has lasted long enough for
familiarity to supervene. If I saw a man while
reading the London Spectator fall from his chair
in a fit of laughter, if I saw some elderly gentle
man throw the Atlantic Monthly up in the air with
shouts of joy, I should suppose of course that
each of them was out of his mind. When review
ers of fiction behave as they constantly do in this
same manner over events that are no whit more
significant, it is not necessary, perhaps, to take so
serious a view of their condition of mind; but it
is natural to suppose that they are the unconscious
victims of the malady that I have described.

HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE

When I read M. Georges Pellissier's book on
Shakespeare some years ago I could not see why
he should have lashed himself to Shakespeare in
that hostile intimacy. Probably no other English
poet could have been found, except perhaps
Browning, who would so essentially offend his
modern, Gallic intelligence, and one would think
M. Pellissier, after yawning through a half-
dozen of the plays, would have smiled or cursed
according as his impulse prompted, and thrown
the rest of them away. Instead of that he
dragged his incompatible mind not only through
the whole length of Shakespeare's dramas, but
over a large area of the dullest Shakespearean
criticism as well. It seemed heroic but singularly
unnecessary. It was as if, on meeting a woman
whom he particularly disliked, he had straightway
married her and then taken notes for the next
ten years in corroboration of his disagreeable first
impressions. Never was a man more diligent in
the accumulation of ennui. He turned the plays
inside out for evil instances and he gathered them

145

i46l THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

in awful heaps — bad puns, platitudes, pleonasms,
contradictions, incoherencies, bombast, mixed
metaphors, and bungled plots — in short, every
fault of style, structure, character analysis or
moral teaching that a life-long, conscientious
hater of the bard could lay his hands on — and as
they were all rendered in perfectly commonplace
modern French, they presented a sorry spectacle.
It was as honest and thorough a job in damnation
as had been done in many a year, and for that
reason very interesting. Any one who really
hated a poet could find there an admirable illustra
tion of the way to go about it.

First of all there were the outrageous liberties
which Shakespeare takes with the sacred unities
of time and place and action. M. Pellissier pro
fessed to be more liberal than Aristotle in that
matter, but his nerves went all to pieces amidst
the riotings of Shakespeare. Why, there are
seven changes of place in the second act of "The
Two Gentlemen of Verona," and six in the first
act of "Coriolanus," and thirteen in the third act
of "Antony and Cleopatra," ranging over three
continents, all that was then known of the surface
of the globe! And as to time, in some plays the
action is supposed to run for years, which is
manifestly incredible, while in others it is tele
scoped into so tight a compass that villainy has
no chance to germinate or passion to expand.

HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 147

How is a character to develop in three hours?
How could the events of ''Measure for Measure"
squeeze themselves into a week? Fancy M.
Hervieu doing such a thing, or Donnay, Mirbeau,
Brieux, Capus, or even Rostand. Macbeth could
not have become so ambitious as he was in four
days, or Othello so jealous. In "The Tempest"
Prospero puts Ferdinand to the trial by making
him carry logs and finally releases him and re
wards him with the hand of Miranda in these
words :

All thy vexations

Were but my trials of thy love, and thou
Hast strangely stood the test. . . .
Then, as my gift, and thine own acquisition
Worthily purchased, take my daughter —

But says M. Pellissier, watch in hand, how long
has Ferdinand actually been at this log business?
He did not lift a single log till after the close of
the first act, and he left off logging immediately
before the beginning of the fourth. Thus his
logging activities could have lasted no more than
a single hour! Considering what the Charity Or
ganization demands of a tramp in return for a
night's lodging, Ferdinand was grossly overpaid.

Although he found the logs very heavy, would an hour
of that work suffice, as his father-in-law said, for the
"worthy purchase" of Miranda?

1481 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

The matter seemed all the more unpardonable
when Prospero's lines were rendered in such
words as these —

Les tourments que je t'ai infliges devaient eprouver ton
amour; tu les as merveilleusement supportes, etc.

On the other hand, the action of the "Winter's
Tale" skips sixteen years and the figure of Time
appears on the stage and "without any scruple"
tells the audience what has happened. Yet in this
very play Shakespeare rushes the King into a
jealous fit more suddenly than M. Pellissier has
ever seen a jealous fit come on.

Then many of the plays tell several stories at
once. "Cymbeline" tells three, and so does "The
Taming of the Shrew;" "King Lear" tells not
only the tale of the old King betrayed by his
daughters, but that of Gloucester betrayed by his
son; "Timon of Athens" breaks off when it is
about half-way through, and takes Alcibiades for
its new hero; "The Merchant of Venice" spins
two yarns which essentially have nothing in
common.

So M. Pellissier ran on, with mounting indig
nation.

And in "The Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare
does not even respect the rules of simple arithme
tic, for when Jessica tells Portia that she has over
heard Shylock say that he loves the pound of

HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 149

Antonio's flesh more than twenty times three thou
sand ducats, Portia offers at first to pay him six
thousand ducats, and later says she will double
it if necessary and even triple that result. But
says Pellissier, this is by no means the right
amount. "Twenty times the sum due is sixty thou
sand ducats, and 6,000x2x3, is only thirty-six
thousand, a little more than half." He finds
"The Merchant of Venice," indeed, very objec
tionable from almost every point of view: Its
moral teachings are bad, as when Bassanio wins
Portia's hand in the casket test, though he de
served no better than either of the other suitors;
it tells two stories instead of one; and above all
it drags along through an utterly worthless fifth
act, when a few words added to the fourth would
have supplied all that was necessary. The fact
that this same worthless fifth act contains some of
the finest and most familiar lines in all Shakes
peare's writings does not concern him, if indeed
he ever observed it. Punctuality, not poetry, is
the thing.

He is shocked by the shameful waste of time
on light characters and hates all those non-essen
tial clowns, court fools, pedants, drunkards,
thieves, eccentrics. What is the use of Dogberry
and Verges? We find them first giving their tire
some instructions to their men; again, when they
make their report to the governor, who is naturally

150 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

much irritated by their sottise; again, in prison,
questioning the accused; again before the gover
nor; and once more after that. Even if these
"two stupid police officers" were as amusing as
Shakespeare probably thought them, they would
still be absolutely useless; but as a matter of fact
they are dull buffoons fit only for a vulgar street
show. And what a waste of time are the fooleries
of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Touch
stone, Lancelot Gobbo, Speed, Lance, Bottom, the
Dromios, Poor Tom, the grave-diggers and play
ers in "Hamlet," Mercutio, Trinculo, Stephano,
and the rest. Like Mr. Bernard Shaw, he has an
especial aversion for the melancholy Jaques —

JAQUES. I'll give you a verse to this note, that I made
yesterday in despite of my invention.
AMIENS. And I'll sing it.
JAQUES. Thus it goes :

If it do come to pass
That any man turn ass,
Leaving his wealth and ease
A stubborn will to please.

Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame.

Here shall he see

Gross fools as he,

And if he will come to me.

AMIENS. What's that "Ducdame"?

HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 1 5 1

JAQUES. 'Tis a Greek invocation to call fools into a
circle. I'll go sleep if I can; if I cannot, I'll rail against
all the first-born of Egypt.

What philosophy is there in this? asks M.
Pellissier.

From these citations I think it will be plain to
anyone who at any period of his life has found
pleasure in reading Shakespeare that M. Pellissier
has by an accident of birth been for ever debarred
from sharing in it. Therein he resembles the
Shakespeare commentators. To him, as to the
commentator, Shakespeare is not a source of pleas
ure, but a task. Among us common, careless folk,
Shakespeare is not necessarily a sad matter, but
on the strange assiduous tribe who live in foot
notes he has laid a cruel burden. Nothing can
persuade a layman that the Shakespeare scholars
are not men who privately loathe Shakespeare.
Otherwise, why their amazing marginal irrele-
vancies?

Act L, Sc. II., Line 20, Note 56. "Biting." Often
used metaphorically by Shakespeare. So of "nipping"
Cf. "a nipping and an eager air."

They write their notes, like schoolboys marking
up their text-books' margins. In Shakespeare's
company and longing for escape, they pass the
time in queer, superfluous labors, memory exploits,

152 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

and verbal divagations, sometimes quoting all the
passages that resemble a little the one in hand,
sometimes all the lines they can think of that do
not at all resemble it, not knowing what to do, yet
bound to seem busy, hence elucidating, collating,
emending, bickering with some other commentator
fifty years dead, expounding prepositions, ex
pounding anything, merely to relieve the awful
tedium of being alone with Shakespeare. Hating
poetry, they collect adverbs, or explain discrep
ancies in the time of day, or quote the moral re
flections of some tired predecessor. I have seen
a sentiment from Dr. Johnson which no free-born
Anglo-American reader would remember for five
minutes hoarded by these forlorn sub-Shakes
pearean Crustacea for five generations. And they
are under no compulsion. That is what puzzles
every care-free person — why this especially un
sympathetic class of men should have ever gone
into the business at all, when there are chess,
stamp-collecting, autographs, numismatics, golf,
peace movements, book-plates, gardening, pressed
flowers, social welfare work, taxidermy, solitaire
— so many perfectly respectable occupations, at a
safe distance from the hated bard.

And the best thing in M. Pellissier's book is
the vengeance it takes on them. The same sort
of reasons that they have hypocritically presented
for a hundred years as ground for loving Shakes-

HOW TO HATE SHAKESPEARE 153

peare are here presented with greater force as
ground for hating him. So he strips the mask
from the other unimaginative scholars who pre
ceded him and reveals their sullen faces.

CONFESSIONS OF A GALLOMANIAC

I have no idea what Mr. George Moore meant
by saying in one of his literary discussions that
Americans write better than Englishmen because
they are safer from French influence. It seems
quite obvious to me that Americans write worse
than Englishmen, and that one of the reasons for
it is that they are under English influence. Per
haps if they went by way of France there might
be a chance of their escape from the prolonged
colonialism of American letters and there would
at least be the benefit of variety. Our writers are
a timid people, like the conies, and in all prob
ability they would still be imitating something but
they would at least be imitating something further
off. I could pick out twelve rather important
American novelists on whom the experiment could
have been tried without the least danger to current
literature. And take the case of Mr. George
Moore himself. Having but little power of self-
analysis he would probably not know what had
been best for him, but even he would hardly wish
to have escaped his French experience. He is
better, not worse, for his resemblance to Flaubert.

154

A GALLOMANIAC 155

Not to imply that he has taken Flaubert as a
model; I do not even know whether he has given
him a thought; but his style in English is the pre
cise equivalent of Flaubert's — delicate, flexible, in
evitable. One may not like what Mr. George
Moore says but one cannot easily imagine, espe
cially in his earlier novels, that there could be any
other way of saying it. That, I believe, is a
French and not an English characteristic.

However,! am not concerned here with the train
ing of Mr. George Moore or with the redemp
tion of American novelists, but with my own small
affairs. How to expose myself sufficiently to that
same French influence which he considered so
disastrous to the English language had been my
problem during the entire period of the war.
Down to the outbreak of the war I had no
more desire to converse with a Frenchman in
his own language than with a modern Greek.
I thought I understood French well enough
for my own purposes, because I had read it off and
on for twenty years, but when the war aroused
sympathies and sharpened curiosities that I had
not felt before, I realized the width of the chasm
that cut me off from what I wished to feel. Nor
could it be bridged by any of the academic, natural,
or commercial methods that I knew of. They were
were either too slow or they led in directions that
I did not wish to go. I had not the slightest de-

THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

sire to call taxis, buy tickets, check trunks and
board sleeping-cars all through Europe, since I
doubted if I should go there. Neither did I wish
to draw elaborate comparisons at some boarding-
house table between Central Park and the Bois de
Boulogne. I tried a phonograph, and after many
bouts with it I acquired part of a sermon by Bos-
suet and real fluency in discussing a quinsy sore
throat with a Paris physician, in case I ever went
there and had one. I took fourteen conversation
lessons from Mme. Garnet, and being rather well
on in years at the start, I should, if I had kept
on diligently, be able at the age of eighty-five to
inquire faultlessly my way to the post-office. I
could already ask for butter and sing a song writ
ten by Henry IV — when my teacher went to
France to take care of her half-brother's children
by his second wife, their father having been killed
in the trenches. I will say this for Mme Garnet.
I came to understand perfectly the French for all
her personal and family affairs. No human being
has ever confided in me so abundantly as she did.
No human being has ever so sternly repressed any
answering confidences of my own. Her method
of instruction, if it was one, was that of jealous,
relentless, unbridled soliloquy.

Thrown on the world with no power of sustain
ing a conversation on any other subject than the
members of the Garnet family, I nevertheless re-

A GALLOMANIAC 157

solved to take no more lessons but to hunt down
French people and make them talk. What I
really needed was a governess to take me to and
from my office and into the park at noon, but
at my age that was out of the question. Then be
gan a career of hypocritical benevolence. I
scraped acquaintance with every Frenchman whom
I heard talking English very badly, and I became
immensely interested in his welfare. I formed
the habit of introducing visiting Frenchmen to
French-speaking Americans and sitting, with open
mouth, in the flow of their conversation. Then
I fell in with M. Bernou, the commissioner who
was over here buying guns and whose English
and my French were so much alike that we agreed
to interchange them. We met daily for two weeks
and walked for an hour in the park, each tearing
at the other's language. Our conversations, as I
look back on them, must have run about like this :

"It calls to walk," said he, smiling brilliantly.

"It is good morning," said I, "better than I had ex
tended."

"I was at you yestairday ze morning, but I deed not
find."

"I was obliged to leap early," said I, "and I was busy
standing up straight all around the forenoon."

"The book I prayed you send, he came, and I thank,
but positively are you not deranged?"

"Don't talk," said I. "Never talk again. It was

i58i THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

really nothing anywhere. I had been very happy, I re
assure."

"Pardon, I glide, I glode. There was the hide of a
banane. Did I crash you?"

"I noticed no insults," I replied. "You merely gnawed
my arm."

Gestures and smiles of perfect understanding.

I do not know whether Bernou, who like myself
was middle-aged, felt as I did on these occasions,
but by the suppression of every thought that I
could not express in my childish vocabulary, I
came to feel exactly like a child. They said I
ought to think in French and I tried to do so,
but thinking in French when there is so little
French to think with, divests the mind of its ac
quisitions of forty years. Experience slips away
for there are not words enough to lay hold of it,
and the soul is bounded by the present tense. The
exigencies of the concrete and the immediate were
so pressing that reflection had no chance. Knowl
edge of good and evil did not exist; the sins had
no names; and the mind under its linguistic limita
tions was like a rather defective toy Noah's ark.
From the point of view of Bernou's and my vocab
ulary, Central Park was as the Garden of Eden
after six months — new and unnamed things every
where. A dog, a tree, a statue, taxed all our
powers of description, and on a complex matter
like a policeman our minds could not meet at all.

A GALLOMANIAC 159

We could only totter together a few ste*ps in any
mental direction, but there was a real pleasure in
this earnest interchange of insipidities and they
were highly valued on each side. For my part I
shall always like Bernou, and feel toward him as
my childhood's friend, and I hope, when we meet
again, I at sixty, he at fifty-five, we may stand
together on a bridge and pluck the petals from a
daisy and count them as they fall into the river,
he in English, I in French. I wonder if Bernou
noticed that I was an old, battered man, bothered
with a tiresome profession. I certainly never sus
pected that he was. His language utterly failed
to give me that impression.

Why should Seneca say it is an utterly ridiculous
and disgraceful thing to be an elementary old
man? Unless a man, as he grows old, gains his
second simplicity, he is either already dead or
damned. There is but one right passion for ad
vancing years and that is curiosity, and curiosity
implies the acceptance of one's mental inferiority
toward an insect, toward a language, toward a
man. Curiosity is never gratified in conversations
as I hear them at my club or as I recall them at
successful dinner-parties, long since mercifully
gone by. Talk among respectable middle-aged
New Yorkers is either an alternate pelting with
opinions or a competitive endeavor to shine.
When old Foggs, throwing down his newspaper,

160 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

bears down on me with his views on labor unions,
which I have known for seven years, it is not from
any wish to talk with me. He regards me as his
mental pocket-handkerchief. In revenge I blow
my views of Wilson on him and off he goes. Each
of us really hates to receive all that the other
has to give him. After conversing thirty years
in New York in the English language, I have
found that, if I am to preserve an interest in my
species, I must begin again in another tongue.
One must begin again at something in middle life,
back in the woods, back on the farm or in the
garden, or down at the bottom of the French
language. Otherwise one will fall among those
dreadful and anachronistic fogies; galvanized
spectators of sports they cannot share in; trailers
of youth to whom they are a nuisance ; ever freshly
Harvard or freshly Yale. Seneca was true to his
theory of sophistication to the end, and so very
properly bled himself to death in the bathtub.

After I lost Bernou I fastened upon an un
frocked priest who had come over here and gone
into the shoe trade, a small, foxy man, who re
garded me, I think, in the light of an aggressor.
He wanted to become completely American and
forget France, and as I was trying to reverse the
process, I rather got in his way. He could talk
of mediaeval liturgies and his present occupation,
but nothing in between, and as he spoke English

A GALLOMANIAC 161

very well, his practical mind revolted at the use
of a medium of communication in which one of us
almost strangled when there was another available
in which we both were at ease. I could not pump
much French out of him. He would burst into
English rather resentfully. Then I took to the
streets at lunch-time and tried newsdealers, book
shops, restaurants, invented imaginary errands,
bought things that I did not want, and exchanged
them for objects even less desirable. That kept a
little conversation going day by day, but on the
whole it was a dry season. It is a strange thing.
There are more than thirty thousand of them in
the city of New York, and I had always heard that
the French are a clannish folk and hate to learn
another language, but most of my overtures in
French brought only English upon me. The more
pains I took the more desirable it seemed to them
that I should be spared the trouble of continuing.
I could not explain the situation. I was always
diving into French and they were always pulling
me out again. They thought they were humane.
After all, hunting down French people in the
city of New York who spoke English worse than
I spoke French, was as good an exercise as golf,
and it took less time. One reason why a good
deal of skill is required is because they hate broken
French worse than most of us hate broken English.
Then there is of course that natural instinct to

i6a THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

alleviate apparently needless suffering, and my
object was to stave off rescue as long as possible.
When dragged out into the light of English I tried
to talk just as foolishly in order that they might
think it was not really my French that was the
matter with me. Sometimes that worked quite
well. Finding me just as idiotic in my own lan
guage they went back to theirs. It certainly
worked well with my friend M. Bartet, a para
lytic tobacconist in the West Thirties near the
river, to whom my relation was for several months
that of a grandchild, though, I believe we were
of the same age. He tried to form my character
by bringing me up on such praiseworthy episodes
of his early life as he thought I was able to grasp.

Now at the end of a long year of these persist
ent puerilities I am able to report two definite
results : In the first place a sense of my incapacity
and ignorance infinitely vaster than when I began,
and in the second a profound distrust, possibly
vindictive in its origin, of all Americans in the city
of New York who profess an acquaintance with
French culture, including teachers, critics, theater
audiences, lecture audiences and patronesses of
visiting Frenchmen.

It was perhaps true, as people said at the time,
that a certain French theatrical experiment in New
York could not continue for the simple reason
that it was too good a thing for the theatre-going

A GALLOMANIAC 163

public to support. It may be that the precise
equivalent of the enterprise, even if not hampered
by a foreign language, could not have permanently
endured. Yet from what I saw of its audiences,
critics, enthusiasts, and from what I know of the
American Gallophile generally, including myself,
I believe the linguistic obstacle to have been more
serious than they would have us suppose — serious
enough to account for the situation without drag
ging in our aesthetic incapacity. It was certainly
an obstacle that less than one-half of any audience
ever succeeded in surmounting.

I do not mean that the rest of the audience got
nothing out of it, for so expressive were the play
ers by other means than words, that they often
sketched the play out in pantomime. The physical
activities of the troupe did not arise, as some of
the critics declared, from the vivacity of the Gallic
temperament; nor were they assumed, as others
believed, because in the seventeenth century French
actors had been acrobats. These somewhat ex
aggerated gestures were occasioned by the percep
tion that the majority of the spectators were be
ginners in French. They were supplied by these
ever-tactful people as a running translation for a
large body of self-improving Americans.

But while no doubt almost everybody caught,
as he would have said, the gist of the thing, though
not quite understanding all the words, very few,

i 64 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

I believe, were in any condition to judge of the
play as a play. This seemed particularly true
when reading the published commentaries. The
players deserved all the eulogies they received,
but if they could have beheld the inner state of the
eulogists they would not have felt in the slightest
degree buoyed up.

La Fontaine's Enchanted Cup, for example, as
produced by these players, was admirable, and a
certain New York play reviewer was entirely justi
fied in speaking of it in the highest terms, but the
fact that he thought the words for an "enchanted
cup" really meant an "exchanged coupe" detracted
a little from the value of his testimony.

This may have been rather an extreme instance
among the commentators, but there were approxi
mations to it on all sides and particularly among
those people who adored, as they said, the French
drama, French art, the fine, frank simplicity of
the French character, and above all the incompar
able lucidity of the French language and the in
imitable manner that the French have of saying
tEings. For though we Gallophiles may some
times get a little bit mixed up; though we may
mistake a bad player for a good one, and prose for
poetry, and a commonplace for a shining epigram;
though we may confound a horse-cab with a crystal
vessel, and humor with obscenity; though, as we
would say, these nuances may to a certain extent

A GALLOMANIAC 165

be lost upon us, it does not follow that our love
of French things is any less intense, and it cer
tainly is no less panegyrical. But it does follow,
I believe, that at that particular moment we were
not quite ripe for a serious encounter with the
French drama when rendered in actual French;
and its discontinuance was no reflection on our
artistic taste. We had not reached the stage at
which artistic taste emerges. We were far away
from the intimacies of art, battling in the outskirts
of comprehension.

"Messieurs et mesdames: During my six weeks* sojourn
in your wonderful country I have realized that America
is one thing above all others. It is the land of oppor
tunity." — Enthusiastic applause.

The welcome accorded to certain French lec
turers by our great universities, society leaders and
women's clubs during the war made no unfair
distinctions. It was not withheld merely because
the lecturer through no fault of his own, had
nothing to say; nor was the applause reserved for
the better portions of his discourse, or even for
those portions which were intelligible. One of
the most successful lectures ever delivered before
a woman's club in New York City was given by a
Frenchman, who, having taken a severe cold, was
entirely inaudible from beginning to end. The
applause was almost continuous. In the warmth

1 6$ THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

of our ardor for France one Frenchman was as
good as another, just as after the first intoxication
any brand of wine will do. The one French con-
ferencier from whom all good Gallophiles should
immediately have fled was, by a strange mischance,
precisely the one that riveted their attention.
Three of our leading universities and huge bands
of our socially important womanhood succumbed
instantly to his charm. It is to the honor of the
French nation that it sent over to us as a rule
only perfectly sensible persons; but it really was
not necessary. It might have sent over imbeciles
and in the very centre of our American French
culture no one would have noticed anything amiss.
In the present state of our knowledge subtle dis
tinctions of this sort are thrown away on us.

We can pay Frenchmen every compliment in
the world except that of telling them apart. Even
our most cultivated critics, having it on good au
thority that a gifted French author has a brilliant
style, will generally quote by a strange fatality the
rare passages in his writings that are entirely
commonplace.

I do not blame other Americans for dabbling in
French, since I myself am the worst of dabblers,
but I see no reason why any of us should pretend
that it is anything more than dabbling. The usual
way of reading French does not lead even to an
acquaintance with French literature. Everybody

A GALLOMANIAC 167

knows that words in a living language in order
to be understood have to be lived with. They
are not felt as a part of living literature when you
see them pressed out and labeled in a glossary,
but only when you hear them fly about. A word
is not a definite thing susceptible of dictionary ex
planation. It is a cluster of associations, reminis
cent of the sort of men that used it, suggestive
of social class, occupation, mood, dignity or the
lack of it, primness, violences, pedantries or plati
tudes. It hardly seems necessary to say that words
in a living literature ought to ring in the ear with
the sounds that really belong to them, or that
poetry without an echo cannot be felt. Poetry if
it rings in the ears of the usual American reader
of French literature must inevitably make a noise
that in no wise resembles any measured human
sound; it is merely a punctuated din. But prob
ably it does not sound at all; it is probably read
as stenographic notes.

It may be that there is no way out of it. Per
haps it is inevitable that the colleges which had
so long taught the dead languages as if they were
buried should now teach the living ones as if they
were dead. But there is no need of pretending
that this formal acquaintance with the books re
sults in an appreciation of literature. No sense of
the intimate quality of a writer can be founded on a
verbal vacuum. His plots, his place in literature,

1 68 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

his central motives, and the opinion of his critics
could all be just as adequately conveyed, if his
books were studied in the language of the deaf
and dumb. Of course, one may be drawn to an
author by that process but it would hardly be the
artistic attraction of literature; it is as if one
felt drawn to a woman by an interest exclusively
in her bones. Elementary as these remarks may
seem I offer them to Gallophiles without apology.
On the contrary I rather fear that I am writing,
over their heads.

Of course nobody realizes how far away he is,
for the pursuit of the French language in this
country is invariably accompanied by the belief
that it has been overtaken. One hardly ever meets
an American who knows any French at all who is
not filled with a strange optimism as to the amount
of it, for the learning of French is a sort of
course in progressive hallucination, everybody be
lieving, both teacher and taught, that he is further
along than he is.

I have heard it said that some day there might
be such a change in the system of teaching as
would enable a careful student, after seven years,
to face an actual French person without stuttering,
without wild and groundless laughter, without
agony of gesture, and without gargling his throat.
I have heard reformers say that the American
expert in the French language really must be saved

A GALLOMANIAC 169

from the sort of embarrassments he now under
goes. He ought not to be obliged, for example,
they say, to leave a house by the fire-escape because
he cannot ask his way to the door; or to be served
four times to potatoes because he cannot say,
"Je n'en veux plus; or to go about insulting peo
ple whom he has no desire to insult; or to use
language to his hostess which he finds afterward
to have been highly obscene; or to tell a story in
a mystic tongue, known only to himself, com
pounded of the ruins of two languages, or in the
deaf-and-dumb alphabet supplemented by gym
nastic feats, or in words so far apart that every
body in the room listens to the ticking of the clock
between them.

I know nothing about the chance of future
changes, but I have observed very often the pres
ent results; and I will reproduce here as accurately
as I can the table-talk of a serious and by no
means unintelligent man, a finished product of the
present system. He begins, of course, almost in
variably by telling the French person that sits next
to him that he is a woman or that he is not a
woman. He will then say that he is in the rear
because a long time ago he was held underneath
the city; that he tilled the soil of his office slowly;
that he did not jump till six o'clock, though he
usually jumps at five; that he likes cats and oaks
and that he had a cat and an oak once who would

I7Q THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

eat in the cup together; that his aunt had a cat
who killed six smiles in one day; that he had
dropped a piece of bread on the ceiling ; that it is
a good time though the paper promised tears; that
he swims better in dirty water than in cool because
it throws him up in the air. And he will ask for
the following objects, all of which he believes can
be found on the table or easily obtained: A sad
dle — he wants to put some of it in his soup; a
hillside; a little more of the poison; a pear-tree;
a bass wind instrument full of milk; the hide of
any animal; a farmer's daughter of shameless
character; and a portion of a well-set, thick, short-
backed horse.

Now this sort of thing will happen not only to
almost any student under the present system, but
to the majority of the teachers themselves, and as
a rule they do not know that it is happening.
Many Americans will talk French at intervals all
through their lives without ever finding out that
they are not saying a word in French; so great
are the powers of divination among the gifted
people with whom they converse. And again and
again you will see persons who have not emerged
from the condition of the young man whose con
versation I have quoted chosen as French teachers
in institutions of learning. It is compatible with
present standards of scholarship. One may be
have in this manner and publish an intelligible

A GALLOMANIAC 171

monograph on the Felibrige. One may curl up in
some corner of Romance philology where he will
never be disturbed, or range through five centuries
of French literature, putting authors in their
places, or make those unnecessary remarks beneath
a classic text which constitute the essence of foot
note gentility; in short, one may be Teutonically
efficient all around and about the French language
— over it and under it and behind it — and never
once be in it, never once be able to enter into the
simplest human relation with any one who uses it.
And if he is a true product of the system he
will be perfectly satisfied. He will say that chat
tering with French people is only a pleasant ac
complishment, after all, and can easily be acquired
at any time by living with them ; that it has nothing
in common with the aims of serious scholarship;
that it is not to be compared in importance with
the ability to read and appreciate books; that
there is no room for it in the present system and
that it would not be desirable if there were. He
will add lightly that some time he means to brush
up his French conversation. He will say this with
out a qualm, without a trace of pity for the peo
ple he means to brush it on. He does not know
that an American brushing his French in a room
bears the same relation to any peaceful conversa
tion that may be going on in it at the time as is
borne by a carpet-sweeper in action. He does

1721 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

not know that an American when brushing his
French ought to be kept out of rooms. He does
not know that if in the future the relations be
tween this country and France should unhappily
become strained it will be largely due to Ameri
cans brushing French. The system not only with
holds from us the means of understanding the
French language; it encourages us to misunder
stand it. It fills us with the assurance that we are
doing easily what we are not doing at all. It
seems as if American instruction in French were
designed for the frustration of civilized inter
course.

I cannot really blame that French lady who,
after long association with the American function
aries in Paris during the war, pronounced the
opinion that at their best Americans are children
and at their worst they are brutes; nor can I
blame the Americans. I have no doubt that a
large part of the unpleasantness was linguistic.
It is probable that every one of those Americans
was trying to say something very agreeable to the
lady, but when put into language it turned out
the other way. It is probable that many of them
cursed the lady and never knew.

CLASSIC DEBATE

In one of those good, solid British papers,
where, time out of mind, correspondents have
flashed Latin quotations at the editor, or written
long letters on "What constitutes a gentleman?"
they were still, even in war-time, debating in their
usual way, the question of the classics, and they
are as busy with it as ever to-day.

The argument on each side is always very
simple. One tells you that with Latin and Greek
he would never have been the man he now is.
The other says that he would never have been
the man he now is without them. They sometimes
vary it by saying that they would have sooner be
come the men they now are, with (or without)
the classics. Stripped to its bare bones, the debate
seems to be a contest between self-satisfactions.
Why each is so pleased with his present condition
is never explained.

Yet that is obviously of the first importance.
Who cares how a mind was nourished if he can
see no reason why he should place any value on
the mind? When "Doctor of Divinity" writes
at great length on behalf of his humanities, he

173

174 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

does not appear particularly humane, and if
"Biologist" is glad to be without any humanities
at all, there is nothing about "Biologist" per
sonally that tends to make you glad as well. On
the contrary, you would often like to take the
classics out of "Doctor of Divinity" and thrust
them into "Biologist," just by way of shifting
things about a bit on the chance of improving the
situation.

"Philonous" and "Scientificus" come out about
even in dullness, and when old "Philomathicus"
writes from Warwickshire about all that Vergil
has done for him, everyone with a grain of good
taste is sorry Vergil did it. To the mind of an
impartial witness it always ends in a draw. If
they did not brag about it, you could no more tell
which of them had had the classics and which had
not, than you could tell which was vaccinated, if
they did not roll up their sleeves. The only thing
you can make out of the affair, with scientific cer
tainty, is that in every case either the education
was wrong or the wrong man was educated.
And that must be precisely the impression that is
left on any anxious British parent who seriously
observes the usual culture squabble as it comes out
in the magazines. He must long to save the
child from the ultimate fate of either party to it.
He would hate in after life to have the child ex*
plode like the gentleman who is so proud of his

CLASSIC DEBATE 175

classic contents; he would hate to see the child
some day cave in like the gentleman who is so
proud to be without them. For that unsatisfac
tory termination is almost the rule in these violent
culture contests. Each combatant before he can
reach his adversary seems to go to pieces all by
himself. Never by any chance does one kill the
other, though you would suppose on the first in
spection of each one of them that nothing could
be easier to do.

It is the same way with the discussion of the
question in this country though it is here more
likely to turn on considerations of practical utility.
The practical utility argument, for or against the
study of Latin and Greek, seems to me to break
down for the same reason that the German effi
ciency argument broke down during the war.
That is to say, it does not take into consideration
the imponderables. From a good many articles
setting forth to what extent Latin and Greek have
helped or hindered the respective writers in their
careers it would appear that the only test that
they apply is that of contemporary social im
portance.

If I were to say, for example, that but for
my firm grasp at the age of twelve on the exact
difference between the gerund and the gerundive,
I should not have risen to what I have risen to,
it would not be accounted an argument for the

176 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

classics, but rather as a warning against them.
People would look me up and find that I had not
risen to anything.

But if I should stand splendidly forth as presi
dent of the All-Columbian Amalgamated Boot and
Shoe Concern and attribute my well-known or
ganizing talent to the mastery at an early age of
Xenophon's Anabasis, there would be instant
cheering in the classical ranks; whereas if I said
that had it not been for Xenophon's Anabasis, I
should have got ahead much faster, should, in fact,
have fairy whizzed into my presidency of the shoe
business, shouts of triumph would at once ascend
from the Modern School.

There you have the sort of test that is regarded
as really practical — what the classics actually did
to some large, perfectly substantial and hard-
headed shoe man. It is a test much valued in this
debate.

If I were a classical scholar I would not rest
my case on these arguments from practical life,
as the term practical is understood in these dis
cussions. It may be gratifying if one can cite a
dozen bank presidents who approve of Latin and
Greek, but it is a short-lived pleasure. Some one
is soon citing two dozen who disapprove of them.
I have just finished reading the fifteenth article
published within the last two years, which pro
ceeds on the same assumption in respect to a prac-

CLASSIC DEBATE 177

tical life. The writer rounds up in defense of the
classics a considerable number of the politically,
commercially, and scientifically successful persons
of the moment. There are one President, two
ex-Presidents, two Secretaries of State, and a
handsome showing of administrators, bankers,
heads of trust and insurance companies, engineers,
mathematicians, electricians, economists, botanists,
zoologists, psychologists, physicists, and chemists.
This may have been a more bountiful and seduc
tive list than any anti-classical man had produced
at that moment, but it is not a more bountiful one
than he could produce, if you gave him time. It
contains fifty professors of science, both pure and
applied. The man who could not within a week
produce fifty-five on the other side would not be
worth his salt as an anti-classical debater. Then
the unfortunate writer of the first article would
have to find five more, and thus the debate would
resolve itself into a mad competitive scramble for
botanists, engineers, business men, and the like,
to which, so far as I can see, there would be no
logical conclusion till they had all been caught and
tabulated. And after this was all done, we should
be just where we were when we started. For the
success of these successful persons is not a sue-
csful test.

If the majority of them knew, what they never
could know — that is to say that they presided,

1 7 81 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

banked, administered, engineered, insured, botan
ized, and psychologized no better for their study
of the classics, the question of the classics would
still be as open as before. As human beings they
were probably engaged during a considerable
portion of their lives in doing other things than
climbing into presidencies or directng banks or
building bridges or organizing other human
beings. If not, they were forlorn creatures whom
it is not desirable to reproduce. As human beings
their leisure was probably a matter of some prac
tical concern to them. Statistics of success cannot
decide a question that pertains to their personal
leisure. I doubt if statistics of success can decide
any question at all, when the standard of success
is the vague, unstable, arbitrary thing implied in
these discussions. Nobody wants his own life
regulated by the way a chance majority of these
successful persons happen to feel about theirs.
Still less would he want his children to be brought
up only to resemble them. Every plain person
realizes that there is a vast domain of thought,
feeling, and activity, including religion, music,
poetry, painting, sport, dancing, among many
other things that subsists quite independently of
the good or bad opinions of any motley group of
persons picked out by educators as successful at
this day.

When they tell you that some railway manager

CLASSIC DEBATE 179

thinks that Latin has helped him in his labors and
that he still reads Horace for pleasure, they are
telling you nothing either for or against the study
of Latin. Prove that the study of Latin and
Greek so sapped a man's vitality that he lost five
years in getting to the top of his gas company, and
you have really proved nothing against it. Prove
that the extraordinary mental energy acquired by
the perusal of Hoedus stans in tecto domus lupum
vidit praetereuntem shot him into the United
States Senate at thirty^six and you have not said
one word in its favor. This seems fairly obvious,
but the contrary assumption underlies a vast area
of educational printed matter on the subject — all
based on a standard of momentary success, that
is to say, a standard of momentary public toler
ation.

Yet even an educator would not be any more
eager to have his daughter learn to dance, if he
knew that the chief justice of the Supreme Court
had danced regularly all through his career for
its beneficial effects upon his profession, and was
now dancing almost every moment of the day just
for the pleasure of it. He does not want the
doings of the chief justice to mould his daughter's
life in all particulars. He probably would just as
lief she did not resemble in many ways that un
doubtedly respectable person.

And the question of the classics is in this outside

i8o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

domain, whatever their casual relation may be to
a random group of professional, business, and
scientific activities. It is true, for example, that
the best poetry in the English or any other lan
guage is detested by the one thousand ablest
executives in this country at this moment. But
that is not supposed, even among educators, to
have any relevance to the question of its value.
Even in the wildest educational articles of the
month, you do not find this fact advanced as a
conclusive argument from practical life for the
promotion of the detestation of poetry. Nobody
takes the child aside and says: "Hate poetry and
up you go to the very top of the drygoods
business."

These arguments assume that any influence was
harmful if it delayed these not very interesting
persons in blossoming into the sort of beings they
afterwards became. From reading the testimony
of these persons it is impossible to discern any
reason for that belief. Each one implies that if
he had had his way, he would have become the
man he is much sooner. But how does he know
that he did not become the man he is too soon?
Writers on the subject find an argument for a
course of study in the mere fact that it has
speeded miscellaneous successful persons along
the way they went toward the places where you
happen to find them, when so far as any sensible

CLASSIC DEBATE 181

man can see, they might just as well be somewhere
else.

But perhaps educators do not really attach any
importance to this nonsense. They are, no doubt,
more sensible than they seem. There is no use in
taking the malign view of educators that their
personalties resemble their usual educational arti
cles. They probably do not believe any more
than I do in a neat hierarchy of success with the
better man always a peg above the worse one, or
that if you skim the cream of contemporary cele-
brites you will have a collection of more practical
lives than if you had taken the next layer or the
layer below that. Practical lives, as led in Ger
many during the last forty years or so, must begin
to seem to them now somewhat visionary. And
they can hardly retain a sublime confidence in the
standards of success of their own generation,
which, though equipped with the very latest
modern efficiency tests and appliances, neverthe
less reverted overnight almost to a state of can
nibalism. They probably would admit that in
stead of compelling the next generation to re
semble the sort of persons that society has often
permitted to become uppermost in this, it might
be only humane to give it a fair chance of not
resembling them. When you read the language
of educational disputes tradition begins to seem a
reasonable thing. Educational debaters argue

1 8 21 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

with an air of mathematical certainty, as if work
ing out an equation, and then produce a solution
containing such hopelessly unknown quantities as
the value of the opinion of fifty-seven more or
less accidentally important persons as to the sort
of lives all the rest of the world should live.

Of course, these speed tests of education ap
plied to public careers are unconvincing, simply
because the larger part of life does not consist in
publicly careering. And distrust of the middle-
aged successful man on the subject of his own edu
cation is justified, because he is an instinctive
partisan of his own success. It would be a cruel
thing to entrust writers on education with their
own education. If they had been brought up on
their own writings many of them would never
have pulled through.

Take for instance, the illustrious case of Mr.
Bernard Shaw. Mr. Shaw favored a system of
education which began by abolishing almost every
thing and which would certainly have resulted in
abolishing Mr. Shaw. It was a good, clean, con
sistent sweep of every tradition. It abolished
homes, marriage, fathers, mothers, schools, rules,
text-books, settled residence, settled convictions,
moral, social and religious preconceptions or con
trols; it rid the child of family ties, personal affec
tions, local customs and every other narrowing
influence, and turned him out to roam and learn

CLASSIC DEBATE 183

and so have a chance of free development; every
body's children to be brought up by everybody
else, and thus escape the danger of spoiling and
all to be kept in constant motion all over the
British Isles lest they contract a local prejudice —
each to be perfectly free in all respects except that
he must not entertain a settled principle or meet a
relative.

Now I do not criticize this system, nor do I
deny that it may be just as sensible as the ideas
of modern educational writers generally. But I
do contend that if Mr. Shaw had been brought
up under it the modern English and American
stage would have lost its brightest light. He
curses all restraints on his development. I am
grateful to them, for I am quite sure they saved
his life. A Shaw more Shavian than he actually
became would have been hanged at the age of
twenty.

And I should take tradition rather than the word
of Mr. G. H. Wells in those two novels of his
on the subject of education. I believe the classical
tradition had more to do with the making of Mr.
H. G. Wells than any treatise on biology that he
ever read. Mr. Wells has more in common with
Plato than he has with Herbert Spencer, and it
is because he writes more in the style of the
Phasdo than he does in the style of The Principles
of Sociology that we read him. If Mr. Wells con-

1 84 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

siders Plato a dull old fool, as he probably does,
that has nothing to do with it. He has absorbed
since his nativity a literature that has been steeped
for many centuries in the writings of these old
fogies he despises. In a sense they own him, so
far as there is anything in him that is worth per
manently possessing. Mr. Wells is essentially a
very ancient person, but, being incapable of self-
inspection, he does not know how he came by a
large part of his incentives and suggestions. That
is why he has so often moved in circles rediscover
ing old thoughts that antedate the Christian era,
and thinking they were new. If an archeologist
examined Mr. Wells, he would find him full of
the ruins of ancient Rome, and he is much the
brisker writer for containing them. Nobody
would be reading Mr. H. G. Wells to-day if he
were a mere product of contemporary science. If
he could have applied his theory of education to
his own bringing-up he would have committed
literary suicide.

I mention these writers as the most conspicuous
examples of failure to take into account the im
ponderables. I believe that it is these imponder
ables which account in a large measure for any
thing in them that is likely to prove to be perma
nent; in short that they are the product of the
humanism that they disown. I believe that so far
as they or any other exceptional living writers are

CLASSIC DEBATE 185

in a permanent sense lively, they are in reality
dancing to tunes played by persons who died be
fore the Christian era.

A better instance than either of these typical
contemporaries is that of one of their immediate
ancestors. Samuel Butler in "The Way of All
Flesh" is almost as ferocious toward Latin and
Greek as he is toward fathers and mothers. He
suggests no substitute for Latin or Greek any
more than he suggests a substitute for fathers and
mothers, but he implies that all four should be
abandoned instantly on the chance that substitutes
may turn up. Now I know that the radicalism
of Samuel Butler in respect to these and other
matters is what mainly interests the modern com
mentator. But it has nothing to do with his per
manent interest. Dozens of more radical writers
may be found everywhere who are exceedingly
dull. The value of "The Way of All Flesh'.' is in
its texture — the weaving together of a thousand
small things — and not in a few large, central
thoughts. Essentially it is in the best tradition of
the English novel. Also it is hopelessly entangled
with the classics. He had to make his hero take
honors in them at the university in order to get
the muscle to attack them. He is a prize-fighter
who knocks out his own boxing-masters in his in
dignation at having learned nothing from them.

But I suppose the arguments I have been quot-

1 8 6 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

ing are merely the little missiles of debate. I
doubt if any one really thinks it is a matter to be
settled by the points at which persons happen to
be perching in society at the present moment. I
suppose these writers would admit that the classics
are not and never have been chiefly valuable as
the means of success. They are obviously valued
as the means of escaping its consequences. They
are not esteemed for getting one on in the modern
world, but for getting one pleasantly out of it —
that is to say for the exactly opposite reason to
that which social statistics, psychological measure
ments of mental growth, testimony of engineers,
educational specialists, chemists and bank directors
always emphasize.

Men turn to the classics in the hope of meeting
precisely the sort of people who would not write
these articles on the classics. Men turn to the
classics to escape from their contemporaries. Cur
rent arguments do not affect the central point,
namely the wisdom of breaking with a tradition
that has bound together the literatures of the
world for twenty centuries and has vivified a large
proportion of the greatest authors in our own.

'But I do not believe that any muddle of present-
day educational policy can do any lasting damage.
Suppose it goes from bad to worse. Suppose after
ceasing to be required, the study of Latin and
Greek ceases even to be admitted. Suppose this

CLASSIC DEBATE 187

is followed by another plunge of progress that
would dazzle even Mr. Wells and a mere parsing
acquaintance with a Latin author is regarded as
not merely frivolous, or eccentric, like fox-trotting
or button- collecting, but as downright heinous,
like beer-drinking in the teeth of a Prohibition
gale.

Imagine even graver changes — imagine the era
of scientific barbarism dawning in 1925 as the un
scientific era of barbarism dawned in 476 and
Soviets set up everywhere in America, and paper
scarce as everything would be under Bolshevism,
and Latin and Greek books turned again into
palimpsets and obliterated and replaced with
strange dark Bolshevik texts presumably all writ
ten in the Yiddish language. Nevertheless, at the
blackest moment of black Bolshevism they would
still be read just as they were still read at the very
darkest moment of the ages which we call dark.

The Bolshevists could be no worse for them
than were the German tribes. Here and there
half-human Bolhevists would preserve a text just
as here and there the less fanatical monks did,
and there would be a vast deal of subterranean
scholarship at work, all the keener on account of
persecution. Probably Bolshevist suppression
would do no more harm than the teaching of
American Germanized college professors did dur
ing the last generation. In fact, it might actually

1 8 8! THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

be a great deal better if we were to persecute the
classics than to teach them as we do. When
you read the notes in the usual school Vergil,
simple illiteracy takes on a certain charm.

Make Latin and Greek illegal, and caves in the
mountains will gradually fill up with refugees bear
ing dictionaries — refugees from the great sprawl
ing documentary modern novel, from modern
philosophies gone stale in ten years, from new
thoughts better expressed twenty-four hundred
years ago, from the yearly splash of new poets
swimming along in schools, from religions of
good digestion, competitions for public astonish
ment, the shapeless solemnity of presidential mes
sages and serious magazines, in short, from all the
incoherency and formlessness of the tremendous
opinions of the too familiar present moment which
somehow for the life of him nobody can manage
to remember the next moment. It may not be a
bad experiment. It will inevitably be followed by
a renaissance.

THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS

An Englishman's burdens are hard enough to
bear without a London writer's insisting that from
this time on he shall expand into "warmth and
cordiality" at the first meeting with a stranger;
and the writer, though right in 'his view of the
importance of Anglo-American goodwill, is wrong
in saying that the chill of the British introduction
causes suffering in this country. The grimness
of that first moment has already become tradi
tional and it is now expected by every people in
the world. There is no hardship in the long
silence and the leaden eye when you are prepared
for them and know they mean no harm. On the
other hand an encounter with a suddenly expand
ing Englishman would be shocking, in its sharp
reversal of all precedents. There is no reason
why the Englishman, like other solids, should not
have his melting point. If he unbent on first
acquaintance, he would seem like a ramrod that
melted in the sun. .Smile after the first handshake,
says this writer, and be natural — as if anything
could be less natural to a well-bred Englishman,
than any such wild social turbulence. No one ex-

1 90 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

pects warmth from him out of hand any more
than one expects a hen to lay a soft-boiled egg
for him; and a wise man will blame the one no
more than the other. After all, why is their way
worse than ours? There is no greater hardship
in having to dig conversation out of an English
man than in having to dig yourself out of the con
versation of your fellow citizens.

But there does seem to be a misunderstanding
between those two small classes in the two coun
tries who are mainly concerned with the outward
gentilities. And in regard to the true nature of
snobbery, they are certainly at odds. I think our
side has the right of it — my patriotic bias, perhaps.

"How the Americans do love a Duke!" is a
frequent comment in certain British journals, and
they then proceed to the sober generalization that
uthe United States is a nation of flunkies and of
snobs." Whoever will be at the pains to follow
British weekly journalism will find this sentiment
repeated every little while. He will observe
among this class of writers that vulgarity is a
matter of geography, being reckoned from Pall
Mall as time is from Greenwich.

Now as to snobs, New York's streets are of
course often choked with them. A duke, an
elephant, a base-ball pitcher on Fifth Avenue,
may at any time be the center of a disproportion
ate and servile attention from both the American

THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 191

people and the press. Yet the cult of the egreg
ious and the greatly advertised has never the deep
devotion of sound snobbery.

Take the American newspaper view of "so
ciety," for example. You would certainly have to
call that snobbery. A friend of mine once became
quite indignant on the subject and wrote about it
bitterly. According to the newspapers, said he,
all the blessings and misfortunes of life fall only
on people who are "in society." He wanted to
know why in Heaven's name they print such
"arrant nonsense," and he asked, "If we are not
all snobs, why try so hard to make us so?"

Now of course this country is full of climbers.
No one here is content with that station in life
to which it has pleased God to call him; and if
he were, some female relative would surely push
him along. And since we are all trying to "get
on," with a pretty fair chance of it, for our dullest
people are always at the top, it is not strange that
we should value all the little symbols of on-getting,
and being "in society" is one of them. What if
"society" does stretch as far as the wives of six
plumbers at a luncheon? What if the term itself
fades into a mere newspaper gesture or habit
and a society reporter at a scene of South African
carnage would probably, by mere reflex action,
write, "Hottentot Society Girl Spears Five?"
That does not turn readers into snobs. On the

192, THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

contrary, it confuses the snobbery they had before,
and leaves them without a social chart or compass.
A snob cannot tell from an American newspaper
what to be snobbish about. The acreage of our
newspaper snobbery is of course enormous. Even
England, the Sinai of top-hat commandments, land
of Turveydrop, George Osborne, and Sir Wil-
loughby Patterne, England itself shows not so
wide and foolish an expanse of newspaper snob
bery. But the true measure of snobbery is not
in area, but in depth. At the bottom of a true
snob his snobbery is united with his religion. Re
spectable British papers do not, like our own, mix
up all sorts of people under "society" and chatter
about them every day; to them it is a real thing
and holy. Our papers confound snobbery; theirs
treat it with respect. Try as we will, we cannot
really tell who's who; we know that we are guess
ing. At the root of American snobbery is the
cruel canker of distrust. "Society," as an Ameri
can newspaper concept, includes any member of
the Caucasian race not necessarily rich or even
well-to-do, but better off than somebody else some
where. If interest in it is snobbish, it is one of
the broadest, least invidious forms of snobbishness
ever known, approximating, one might say, a
pretty general brotherly love; for it draws the
mind to a Harlem sociable, and attracts the human
soul to the strange, wild doings of Aldermen's

THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 193

wives at their tea-tables in Brooklyn, probably
clad in goatskins.

It is not for an upstart and volatile people to
dispute the calm supremacy of authentic snobbery.
Your true snob is not inquisitive at all, for he has
no sense of any social values not his own. He
does not flourish in a sprawling and chaotic con
tinent. It is among the tightly closed minds of
tight little islands that he is seen at his best. Our
snobbery is not a sturdy plant, for its vigor is
sapped by that social uncertainty at the root of
it; and what is taken for it here usually springs
from quite alien qualities — curiosity, a vast social
innocence, and a blessed inexperience of rank.
To be sure, if King George came to New York
some one might clip his coat-tails for a keepsake;
and it is quite probably that Mrs. Van Allendale,
of Newport, if asked to meet him, would be all
of a tremble whether to address him as "Sire" or
"My God." But what has this in common with
the huge assurances of true snobbery — its enorm
ous certainty of the Proper Thing, in clothes, peo
ple, religion, sports, manners, and races, and its
indomitable determination not to guess again?

I wish I could do justice to the type of British
literary journalism in which this sort of thing ap
pears. I have tried many times in the twenty years
of my observation but never to my satisfaction.
I suppose it will do no harm to try again. I shall

i94 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

have to typify it under the imaginary title of The
Gentleman's Review, because to pick out a single
one of the several competitors would be invidious.
The essential point of The Gentleman's Review
is that it is written by persons of the better sort
for persons of the better sort. And not only
must the writer be a better sort of person; he
must constantly say that he is a better sort of
person, and for pages at a time he must say noth
ing else. I have read long articles which when
boiled down told the reader nothing else. I have
read articles on socialism, patriotism, labor pro
grammes, poetry, the vulgarity of America and
of the Antipodes, and on divers other subjects
which did literally tell nothing else to the socialist,
laborer, poet, or American or Antipodean outcast
who read them. The gentility of the writers is
never merely suggested; it is announced, and
usually in terms of severity. A coal-heaver read
ing The Gentleman's Review would be informed
in words of unsparing cruelty that he is low. In
deed, it seems the main purpose — at times the only
purpose — for which the Review exists — to tell
coal-heavers and other outside creatures that they
are low. And by outside creatures I mean almost
everybody. I mean not only all Americans, all
Canadians, and other inhabitants of a hemisphere
which, to say the least, is in the worst possible taste
as a hemisphere, besides being notoriously ex-

THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 195

ternal to the British Isles. I mean almost every
body in the right kind of hemisphere. I mean
almost everybody in the British Isles, or even on
the better streets of London. Only a handful of
people can read the typical article of The Gentle
man's Review without feeling that they are at
the bottom of a social precipice.

The ideal of the true-born Gentleman's Re
viewer is not only social exclusiveness, but mental
exclusiveness. He does not argue against an idea
of which he disapproves; he shows that idea to
the door. In a long paper on some form of
radicalism he will say at the start that he must
really refuse to speak of radicalism. The right
sort of people do not speak of radicalism. They
have dismissed it from their minds. And he de
votes his paper to developing the single point that
the only way to deal with radicals is to expunge
them from your list of acquaintances the moment
you find out that they are radicals, and thereafter
not to say a single word to them beyond conveying
the bare information that they have been expunged.
I recall just such a paper as this, and I recall the
impression it made on seven extremely dignified
persons whose successive letters to the editor, all
dated from respectable London clubs, declared
that in the opinion of the writers the danger of
radicalism could not be averted in any other way:
Gentlemen must dismiss radicals from their com-

196 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

pany just as they had dismissed radicalism from
their minds. That done, radicalism would perish.
A writer on a Labor-party programme in The
Gentleman's Review would no more think of meet
ing the arguments for the Labor-party programme
than he would think of meeting the laboring-man
himself. Why bother to prove a Labor-party
programme unsound in face of the towering ab
surdity that there should be such a thing as a
Labor party and that it should have such a thing
as a programme? There are social certitudes
that gentlemen do not discuss. When Labor raises
a question, the Gentleman's Reviewer, if he is true
to type, will simply raise an eyebrow. When
woman's progress was blackening the sky, I read
dozens of article in The Gentleman's Review on
woman's suffrage from which I am sure no reader
could make out anything whatever except that a
shudder was running through some gentlemanly
frames. At the threat of a revolt of the working-
class some time ago, The Gentleman's Review
became speechless almost immediately as to the
nature of the revolt. It could only say that some
labor leader had been impolite to a member of
the upper class, and that it feared the lower
classes might, if they kept on in their present
courses, become impolite to the upper ones. The
thought of other perils more horrible than that
shocked it to silence. But perhaps it could not

THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 197

think of other things more horrible than that.
There are things in this world that minds of this
gentlemanly quality really must decline to meet.
They are most of the things in this world.

It is at its best in rebuking other people's man
ners while unconsciously displaying its own. Take
American manners, for instance. Forty years ago
it was saying we were rude because we were young.
It is still saying so. "Centuries of polite interna
tional tradition'1 — we are to understand that it
took at least that much to make a Gentleman's Re
viewer — are not behind us Americans. "Instinc
tive delicacy and sympathy with the feelings of
others" — such as is displayed in the pages of the
Review — "are not commonly possessed by the
very young" — meaning, of course, possessed by
Americans. Why, then, aspire to the courtesy and
tact of ripe old world-wise Europe?

As a rude young thing I should not think of
aspiring to it, if I did not read on the very next
page, perhaps, that the whole share of the United
States in the late war, from the very beginning
of it to the very end of it, was merely a "military
parade." Then the "delicacy" and the "sym
pathy" and the "polite international tradition" of
this fine old world-wise representative are sud
denly brought not only within my reach, but within
easy reach of almost any one. The cook and the
bootblack and the garbage-man and I, and every

1981 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

sort of low American, including colored people,
may now burst out spontaneously and joyously and
unashamed with all the crudities inherent in our
natures, knowing that we can go rro farther in
manners of this type than the writers quoted have
already gone — for the simple reason that there is
no farther to go. If that is the degree of "tradi
tional international politeness" required by the
rich and mellow culture of an older world, why
need a Ute or a Yahoo despair of it? Raw man
from Oklahoma though I am, utterly unfinished,
confined almost exclusively to the companionship
of cows, backgroundles's, uncouth, and in social ex
perience a tadpole, even I can be as delicately
urbane as these exponents of an Old World
culture.

Now I confess I have idealized the situation in
representing this element as the sole constituent
of any single periodical. It may constitute only
a part of a magazine or newspaper, and it may
appear only sporadically. Several magazines
which it pervaded largely at one time have since
died of it, and others seem about to die. But it
is still to be found in reassuring quantities, though
scattered, and one could at any time, by judicious
selection, make up a Gentleman's Review.

I believe it is not only harmless, but desirable.
It is not representative of the English people or
of any English class. It is the unconscious bur-

THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 199

lesque — often a very good one — of insularity, and
the world is the better for a good burlesque. It
is no more like the courteous and witty English
man one meets in life or in books or in the news
papers than is James Yellowplush. If Major Pen-
dennis or Podsnap came to life again and turned
into literary persons, they would write like The
Gentleman's Review. And it is pleasant to meet
again the Pendennises and Podsnaps. Finally it
has supplied many objects of entertaining satire to
the best English writers of plays and fiction during
our own generation. There is only one bad thing
about it and that is entirely the fault of my fellow-
countrymen. Owing to the unfortunate colonial
ism of the American literary class, there are quart
ers in which this sort of thing is taken seriously.
I believe when that happens it is a surprise, even
to the Gentleman's Reviewer himself. I believe
even he is secretly aware that, whatever nature's
reason for presenting him to a patient world may
be, it cannot be for any such purpose as that

In regard to American manners, by the way,
what nonsense we ourselves are in the habit of
writing; why these serious articles every now and
then on the decline of American manners? One
appeared only the other day in a New York
magazine. Declined from what, I wonder. We
have no manners now, to be sure, but there is not
a sign that at any moment of our past history we

2oa THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

ever had any. One would suppose that the prim
people who tell us from time to time that the
"subtle note of real distinction is fading from so
ciety" would be at some pains to ascertain when
and where it had bloomed. The "graceful civil
ities of our grandfathers have vanished," they say.
But do they mean literally grandfathers? If so,
that would take us back to about the era of Mr.
Potiphar and the Reverend Cream Cheese and
ormolu and universal drunkenness. If they mean
great-grandfathers, one has a notion that about
that time the Hon. Lafayette Kettle and Hannibal
Chollop were not uncommon types. If they insist
on the eighteen-thirties, the "subtle note c* real
distinction" must have been extremely hard to
find, to judge from de Tocqueville and Mrs. Trol-
lope, while in the decade before that, Stendhal
and the younger Gallatin had never found a trace
of it. Sometimes they wave the hand in a general
sort of way to the "gentle courtesies of a hundred
years ago," but it was at about that date, I believe,
that Tom Moore was complaining that our man
ners were rotten before they were ripe, while at
the close of the eighteenth century we find that
very agreeable French gentlman, M. Moreaud de
Saint-Mery, remarking the singular brutality of
the gentle families of Philadelphia — not in a very
exacting temper, either, for he merely insisted that
people ought to show more of a spirit of social

THE CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 201

helpfulness than to go on skating while their
friends were falling through the ice and drowning.
And these being merely the haphazard recollec
tions of extremely desultory readings, one natur
ally infers that the bibliography of bad manners
must be enormous and that the dates in it, as the
history of the country goes, would probably be of
quite respectable antiquity. I do not deny that
there may tiave been "graceful civilities" at some
time or other, possibly at Plymouth Rock; I merely
say that these writers never by any chance produce
the proof of it, despite one's pardonable skeptic
ism. These decorous little lamentations on de
cline do, indeed, boil down to nothing. It is as if
one should say, the "subtle note of real distinction"
has within the last five years faded from the sub
way, or manners are no longer courtly on the
uptown evening car.

The frequent appearance of these articles brings
out an important point of difference between
French manners and our own. An Englishman
might write such articles, but a Frenchman, I
believe could not. Sensible Americans go to
France for the purpose of escaping the type
of mind that produces them. They have
nothing to do with manners, but are merely
treatises on toothpick orthodoxy. One of them
begins with an anecdote of a "distinguished
foreigner" who, when asked what he thought was

202, THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

the most striking American characteristic, replied,
"Your lack of respect for your superiors." After
rubbing that in for the proper hygienic interval,
the writer advances to a series of salutary reflec
tions like these: "Nothing can be further from
the truth than the conception that personal delicacy
means personal weakness," and the "unmannered
man adds nothing to the picture of life." Why
add to the national stock of uneasy self-conscious
ness? Surely there is no country on the face of
the globe where so many people to the square mile
are fidgetting over some perfectly worthless pro
priety. Silent prayer is the only recourse for any
honest writer of this type. The moment he
preaches manners to us he puckers us up still more.
And there is this further peril in the thumping
hortatory evangel on the need of being personally
delicate and refined, delivered by people who from
their manner of writing seem as much alike and
rudimentary as doughnuts. If they keep it up
they will surely start a Movement. We can or
ganize for politeness just as well as for mother
hood or for reading poetry, and a Federation of
Clubs of Gentlemanly Endeavor may be even now
in the wind. The very next writer of this article
might in the natural order of things find himself
president of a "nation-wide" organization for the
promotion of personal delicacy, or at least chair
man of his State committee on drawing-room

THE- CHOICE OF BAD MANNERS 203

charm. I can hear the speech at the founder's din
ner, for, of course, the thing would begin with a
dinner:

"Gentlemen, the mark of this era of social
awakening is, as you well know, the spirit of or
ganized social service. People have organized in
our day even in order to chew their own food,
and the associations for digestion, for child-rear
ing, for controlling child-birth, for eating bran,
going barefoot, reading prose, keeping healthy,
and looking at birds are innumerable. What the
individual used formerly to attempt in a feeble
manner on his own account he now does efficiently
by co-operative endeavor. Things that in the old
days no one supposed could be organized are now
discharged by thoroughly competent societies.
For example, as you probably know, American
poetry was organized not long ago, with head
quarters at Boston, the secretary being some mem
ber of the Lowell family, I believe; and every one
of you is doubtless familiar with the practically
complete organization of posterity under eugeni-
cal auspices. Now, if after two and a half centur
ies personal delicacy, and that subtle something
which distinguishes the manners of other peoples,
notably the French, from our own cannot be had
by individual initiative, it is higih time we employed
the measures already so successful in other fields.
It is unreasonable to protest against our pro-

204 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

gramme on the ground that personal delicacy can
not be organized. The same argument was ad
vanced against the organization of agricultural
credit several years ago. Nor is there any force
in the argument that at intervals of three months
for twenty years articles of equal merit have ap
peared in American magazines, each pointing to
perfect breeding without apparently doing any
good. Our propaganda involves the printing of
five such articles every month, to say nothing of
the leaflets, folders and newspaper paragraphs
tKat will pour in a steady stream into every corner
of the country. It is a campaign of education that
we have in mind. To any one who objects that
no scheme for the promotion of personal delicacy
has ever yet succeeded, I reply always with the
simple question: "How many well-printed, attrac
tive folders were sent out?" and he always sub
sides immediately."

TAILOR BLOOD AND THE ARISTOC
RACY OF FICTION

Although, as is well known, tailoring ran for
three generations in the family of George Mer
edith, it would seem from a recent biography that
his own blood was nearly free from it at the age
of two. At that age when another boy (aged
four) came to visit him, he showed, according to
his biographer, such a marked hauteur of manner
that the other boy left the house, never to return.
The aristocratic element in the blood had, he
thinks, even then overcome the tailor corpuscles.

Though hauteur at the age of two seems to this
biographer incompatible with tailor origin, he
does not on that account reject the tailor origin.
He does not, like other writers on Meredith, in
vent a noble father for Meredith, or omit his birth
altogether, or call it "mysterious," or dismiss it
with the usual gasp: "Born of a tailor; who
would have thought it!" On the contrary, he
decides to make the best of this whole bad tailor
business. They were fashionable tailors, at any
rate, he says, and they may have fitted clothes to
admirals in the Royal Navy; and the grandfather,
the 'Great Mel,' had associated on equal terms

205

206 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

with county families — was quite the fine gentle
man, indeed; and George had inherited the gentle
man part of this grandfather, while escaping every
trace of the tailor portion.

I am not a syndicalist and I have no especial
sympathy with a tailor soviet. I certainly should
no more care to live under a tailor dictatorship
than under that of any other labor union. But
if the tailor revolution had to come, and the
bombs were flying and the streets flowing with
the blood of customers, I should be happy to see
certain writers on George Meredith fall into the
hands of the infuriated mob.

A reasonable view of the relation between tail
oring and aristocracy has been quite beyond the
power of Meredith commentators — most of them
having gone all to gooseflesh at the bare thought
of it. And yet Meredith could never have written
about upper classes as he did, if he had not been
the son of a tailor. Only as the son of a tailor
could he have imagined so many of those radiant
beings among the daughters of earls. As the son
of an earl, he would probably have imagined them
among the daughters of tailors. At all events,
we should not find them among the daughters of
earls in any such proportion as we now find them
in his novels. Tailor-distance from an aristocracy
in our day is the only safe distance for purpose
of enchantment.

ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 207

And I wonder if our own "best society" would
not have stood a better chance in fiction if Ameri
can .novelists had been sons of tailors. Not of
course that tailor birth would have made up for
the lack of certain other qualities that Meredith
possessed, but it might at least have helped a little.

There has never been enough illusion about our
upper class, especially among the talented. In
fact the more talented people are, the less enthusi
astic they seem to be about our upper class. Gifted
novelists who know our upper class will die in exile
rather than go on knowing it. Bare acquaintance
with our upper class drove Henry James from
this country for ever; better acquaintance with it
made him the most loyal subject of the British
Crown. Others have rebounded from contact
with our upper classes into the mountains of Ver
mont. A gifted writer who has once met the
better sort of people in New York will often re
main for ever after rooted in the Middle Ages.
Nothing seems to kill so quickly all enthusiasm
for our upper class as contact with it. Even the
dhance of contact checks the flow of fancy.

It is possible that a really interesting figure in
our upper class could be created only in the back
woods by a writer of great talent who had never
once emerged. But tailor-distance from our upper
class might have done something. It is conceiv
able that a glamour might be cast over our lead-

208 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

ing families at tailor-distance, by a strong novelist
who was naturally good at glamour-casting. A
cook could not write a good American novel of
caste, being in too close contact with the family,
but a tailor might.

No American novelist of the first rank, I be
lieve, has ever taken American social distinctions
with a tailor seriousness. Something of a tailor
seriousness in that matter will be found of course
among many good American story-writers, but
they are not of the highest rank. Tailor-birth,
for example, would hardly have enabled the late
Richard Harding Davis to improve on his New
York heroes and heroines, probably would not have
have resulted in any change at all. Tailor-birth
would not have enabled Mr. Robert W. Chambers
to throw more of a glamour over the golden few
than he has thrown without it. But the fiction of
well-bred people in this country has never had the
benefit of that Meredith combination of tailor-
birth and great talent.

Suppose Mr. Howells had been tailor-born
while remaining equally gifted, for example. He
might have turned on that upper class of Boston
a kindling and imaginative eye. He might have
imagined Meredithian aristocrats in Boston — in
teresting people who did as they plea'sed. High
birth in Boston need not have been the unpleasant
thing he describes — making everybody feel what

ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 209

a blessing it is to be born low and elsewhere.
High birth in Boston, seen through the social haze
of tailor-distance, might have seemed to him desir
able. At all events he would not have learned that
every well-bred Boston person must be wwdesir-
able. He would not have made it a law of his
fiction that, whereas interesting people who do as
they please are imaginable, they are not even by
the wildest riot of the fancy ever to be placed
among the upper class of Boston. Tailoring
would have mitigated these rigorous results of a
too close observation.

Despite the confusion of classes in our time
when you never can guess what people will be
like from the sort of families they are found in,
Meredith could still believe that Blood will tell.
And he believed blood told delightfully and in
the most minute detail. He believed that aristo
cratic noses were found on women of the highest
class instead of belonging as they generally do to
shop girls. He believed in a noble bearing
peculiar to lords which is really common to police
men. He imagined in earls the magnificent and
aristocratic poise and the beauty of Italian day
labourers. He believed duchesses walked like
duchesses, when, if we may judge from photc*-
graphs, they must, rather, have tumbled around;
and he believed that people were as stately as he
thought they ought to be when he looked at the

2 1 o THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

dignified and imposing castles that they lived in.

And wit ran in direct ratio to the good birth
of his characters, and not inversely. That was the
final touch of tailor sublimity. Meredith not only
made aristocrats witty in their homes; he made
polite society dine out wittily. Brilliant talk, such
as is carried on by Jews, and tolerated nowhere
in the best society, was attributed by Meredith to
the class of people by whom the dullest things in
the world have been said and about whom the
dullest books in the world have been written.

Henry James, born in a Harlem tailor-shop
and never straying far away, Henry James, with
three tailor ancestors looking down from the walls
upon him, might have imagined five divinely com
plicated women east of Central Park, — at least he
would not have absolutely refused even to try, on
the ground that they were unimaginable. Henry
James might have worked wonders of aristocratic
subtlety even here, had he remained innocent
enough, and tailoring was one of the few remain
ing guarantees of social innocence.

I do not say that glorious creatures like Laura
Middleton, or Diama, or Aminta, or the other
goddesses of George Meredith could have been
freely sprinkled in our upper class by any imagina
tion short of Meredith's, even with Meredith's
three-fold tailor start. But I do say that much
migiht have been done for our upper class in fiction

ARISTOCRACY OF FICTION 211

by an imagination raised to the third tailor-power
by inheritance. It never has had this supreme
literary chance. What are known as social ad
vantages in this country have been fatal to any
thing like a poetic conception of our upper class.
Never show a gifted novelist above the basement
stairs, if you wish him to retain an exciting sense
of social altitudes. Keep the better sort of liter
ary men away from anybody of the slightest social
importance, if you wish any glamour to be cast.
Aristocracies of fiction will never be perceived
so long as the eyes are open.

In spite of the Saturday Review, and parliamen
tary speeches, and the London Times, and Justin
McCarthy's Reminiscences, and the vast volume
of aristocratic British memoirs published by the
score every year in Meredith's lifetime and our
own, he created by sheer force of genius, guided
by an inherited inclination, the illusion that the
very highest families in England could be amus
ing in their homes. Meredith successfully em
bodied such a vision of aristocracy as nowadays
can be confidently entertained only by three old
maids washing dishes in a farm house. It is ab
surd to imagine, as the biographer does, whom I
have quoted at the beginning of this article, that
there was no tailor in the blood.

In the present muddle of a changing social
order, with the upper class being slowly educated

2 1 2 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

by the classes below, and getting the little wit it
has from them, and all the clever people in one
clasis flying immediately into another, up or down,
with blood telling the wrong story and usually a
very dull one; with people everywhere turning out
to be just wihat they ought not to be from their
antecedents and surroundings, and with the most
remarkable of public characters commonly the
most deadly objects to the private gaze — in these
conditions of our generation, a feat such as Mere
dith achieved becomes increasingly difficult. It
requires, at the least, the advantage of a tailor
ancestry.

OUR REFINEMENT

I do not object to that excellent lady who is
to be found at intervals in the literary columns of
a serious magazine wondering sweetly what the
May-fly thinks in June. On the contrary, a May
fly is a good enough excuse for wonder and
wonder is a good enough excuse for the most
exciting kind of imaginative exercise. There is
no reason why the intimations of immortality con
veyed to ladies by May-flys should not be a perma
nent part of every serious magazine on earth,

I do not object, that is to say, to the situation
itself. I object only to one appalling circumstance.
It is always the same lady and she is always say
ing exactly the same sweet things, and the lan
guage she says them in is not a living human
language. The objectionable thing is the awful
iterativeness of its subhuman literary propriety.

And it is the same way with all those other
things expressive of literary refinement, expressive
of nothing else, but recurring with a deadly cer
tainty, weekly, monthly, perennially, and perhaps
eternally. Those pious papers on the comic spirit,
by American professors of English; those happy

213

2 1 4 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

thoughts on the pleasure of reading good books
rather than bad; on the imperishable charm of
that which is imperishably charming; on the su
periority of tihe "things of the spirit" over other
things not mentioned but presumably gross, such
as things on the dinner table; humorous apologues
of Dame Experience conceived as a schoolmis
tress; tender souvenirs of quaint great-uncles;
peeps at a sparrow, nesting — it would be a sin
to blame them from any other point of view than
that of the future of the English language, for the
subjects are irreproachable and the motives that
actuate the writers on them are as pure as the
driven snow. But they are the mimetic gentilities
of what may be called our upper middle literary
class and they are not expressed in any living
language. Indeed they tend to rob a language of
any hope to live.

Not, of course, that English style is a mere
matter of vocabulary or that the most rollicking
use of the American vernacular in utter Shakes
pearean defiance of propriety would bring Shakes
pearean results. But distinguishable writing does
after all derive from an immense catholicity and
a freedom of choice, not only from among words
that are read but from among words that are
lived with. Nor can it possibly dispense with what
the French call the "green" language — least of all
in this country where the "green" language has

OUR REFINEMENT 2 1 5

already acquired a vigor and variety that is mot to
be found in the books.

Take for example a passage from almost any
serious article in an American magazine, say in
regard to the reconstruction of American educa
tion after the war, for nobody had the slightest
notion what he was writing about when he was
writing on that subject, and there is never any
idea in the article that might distract attention
from the words.

"It can scarcely be denied that the vital needs of the
hour call for something more than the disparate and
unco-ordinated efforts which were unhappily often the
mark of educational endeavor in the past. That looms
large in the lesson of the war. If it has taught us nothing
else the war has at least taught us the necessity of a
synthetic direction of educational agencies toward a defi
nite and realized goal, humanistic in the broad and per
manent sense of the term, humanistic, that is to say, with
due reference to the changing conditions of Society.
The policy of drift must be abandoned once and for all
and for it must be substituted a policy of steadfast,
watchful — etc."

Not that I have seen this particular passage in
an article on the reconstruction of education, but
it might be found in any of them. It is exactly in
the vein of all that I have happened to read; and
Jn the best American magazines you will some-
jtimes find four pages of eight hundred words
Apiece all made up of just such sentences.

2 1 6 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

Compare it for imaginative energy, ingenuity,
humor, any literary quality you like, with the fol
lowing selections from a recent volume on Ameri
canisms and slang:

"See the elephant, crack up, make a kick, buck the
tiger, jump on with both feet, go the whole hog, know
the ropes, get solid, plank down, make the fur fly, put a
bug in the ear, haloo, halloa, hello, and sometimes holler
get the dead-wood on, die with your boots on, horn-
swoggle, ker-flap, ker-splash, beat it, butt in, give a show
down, cut-up, kick-in, start-off, run-in, and jump off, put
it over, put it across, don't be a high-brow, road-louse,
sob-sister, lounge-lizard, rube, boob, kike, or has-been."

The style of this paragraph is by no means so
good as would have resulted from a more careful
selection, for the words are taken at random and
most of them are stale. Moreover, the words are
not nearly so imaginative or vigorous as seven
teenth century terms, since forgotten by the minc
ing generations. The text, for example, is not
for a moment to be compared with that of Sir
Thomas Urquhart's "Rabelais." But even as it
is, it is immeasurably better than my educational
extract and it is just as pertinent to the subject of
education — probably more so. The substitution
of these lists for the usual university president's
magazine contribution on educational reconstruc
tion problems would have helped just as much, if
not more, to the solution of the problems, besides

OUR REFINEMENT 217

being pleasanter to read. Such lists might, I
think, replace with advantage much of what is
called "inspirational literature. " "New Thought,"
for example, might have spared itself thousands
upon thousands of its pages by simple repetition
of these lists.

There were many barkeepers — in better days,
of course — who, if they oould have learned the
literary language without losing grip on their own,
might have made good writers. There are no
professors of English literature who could learn
to write the language even if you gave them all
the advantages of barkeepers. They lack the bar
keeper's fine, reckless imagination in the use of
words. They cannot appropriate a word, or
stretch it, or make it do something it had not done
before, or still less create it out of nothing. They
could not even interest themselves in the "green"
language; their interest arises only when it is dry.
Never, like a washwoman, or a poet, could they
add to the capacities o-f human speech. Their
lives are spent in reducing them. Language would
never grow if ruled by the American upper middle
literary class. It would stiffen and die. Our college
chairs of English and our magazines for "cul
tured" persons probably do more to prevent the
adequate use of our common speech than any other
influences.

Distinguishable English sometimes may be

2 1 8 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

found in an American newspaper; it is never found
in an American literary magazine. In some cor
ner of a newspaper you may find a man writing
with freedom and a sort of natural tact, choosing
the words he really needs without regard to
what is vulgar or what is polite. People are apt
to read it aloud to you without knowing why;
they like the sound of it. That never happens in a
literary magazine. Nobody in a literary magazine
fits words to thought; he fits his thoughts to a
borrowed diction. Nobody in a literary magazine
cares a hang about the right word for the ex
pression of his thought but he is worried to death
about diction. All the best contemporary literary
essays are written in diction and there is no* more
telling the writers apart, so far as their style is
concerned, than if they were all buried in equally
good taste by the same undertaker.

Diction is the great funereal American literary
substitute for style. Indeed that is what they
mean when they praise an author's style. They
do not mean that he has his own style of writing;
they mean that he is in the style of writing.

Measured by the vitality of masterpieces, news
paper English is sometimes fairly good; literary
magazine English is never good. Bad English is
English about to die, such as you see in the maga
zines; the worst English is English that has never
lived — it is the English of American belles-lettres.

OUR REFINEMENT 2 1 9

That is one of the reasons why I hate the self-
improved, traveled American whom I meet in
books and periodicals. I hate him also for what
seems to me the servility of his spirit in the pres
ence of other people's past. I dare say it may be
because I envy him his advantages. That is what
the cultivated person always implies, and he wond
ers how any one, in view of the national crudity,
can have the heart to find fault with these mis
sionaries of taste from a riper culture who have
learned the value of artistic milieux and literary
backgrounds. After all, he says, what Henry
James would call the "European scene" may still
be commended to Americans, and surely it is just
as well that they should be reminded now and
then of what Professor Barrett Wendell used so
admirably to term their "centuries of social in
experience." Nevertheless as he goes on I not
only feel that I aim coarse, but I like the feeling of
it; and for the sake of other people of my own
course type I will present here the excuses of
vulgarity.

I have never been in Paterson, N. J., and I
have never been in Venice, and so far as direct
esthetic personal consequences to myself of golden
hours of dalliance in the two places are concerned,
I am therefore unable to offer a comparison. But
during my life I have met many returned travelers
from Venice and from Paterson and I have read

220 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

or listened to their narratives with as much atten
tion as they could reasonably demand. Theoretic
ally, I accept the opinion of enlightened persons
that Venice is superior, in respect to what edu
cators call its "cultural value, " to Paterson. Prac
tically, and judging merely from the effects upon
the respective visitors, I -am all for Paterson. I
have never met a man w(ho returned from Pater
son talking like the stray pages of a catalogue,
of which he had a complete copy before he started.
Paterson never took away part of a man's mind
and replaced it with a portion of an encyclopedia.
Nobody ever came back from Paterson damaged
as a man and yet inferior as a magazine article.
For the careless person I should recommend Ven
ice; for the culture -seeker, Paterson. Overstrain,
that misery of the conscientious selfamproving
man, with its disagreeable effects upon other peo
ple, could be avoided in Paterson. Out of ten
essays on Venice that I have read, nine were writ
ten by fish out of water who might have swum
easily and perhaps with grace in the artistic cur
rents of Paterson.

•A self-improved American delivered an apolo
getic discourse the other day on the American de
ficiency in backgrounds. Culture cannot take root,
he said; families float; everybody dies in a town
he was not born in; art bombinates in a vacuum;
literature gathers no moss; manners, when they

OUR REFINEMENT 221

exist at all, are accidental; history is clean gone
out of our heads, while every Englishman is
familiar with Bannockburn ; poetry cannot be writ
ten, and it is foolish to try, on account of the
dearth of venerable circumstance; no traditions,
no memories, no inheritance — in fact, no past at
all; not even a present of any consequence, but
only a future; and into this future every man,
woman, and child in the whole foolish country is
moving — though it is not through any fault of
theirs for the unfortunate inhabitants really have
no other place to go to.

I bear no grudge against the author of this
discourse as an individual, but only as a type. In
deed, I am not sure that he is an individual or
that I have reported him correctly, for no sooner
does any one begin in this manner than his words
run into the words of others, forming a river of
sound, and I think not of one man, but of strings
of them — all worrying about the lack of back
grounds, like the man who cast no shadow in the
sun. I deny that it is any one's voluntary attitude ;
it is a lockstep that began before I was born, and
I have no doubt it will continue indefinitely. Seven
centuries after Columbus's injudicious discovery
they will still be complaining, with a Baedeker in
their hands, of the fatal youth of North America.
For they live long, -these people, because, as in
certain lower orders of animal life, apparently,

222 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

there is hardly any life worth losing, and the
family likeness they bear to one another is aston
ishing. The very ones that George William Cur
tis used to satirize as shining in society are still
to be found among us at this moment, but they are
engaged for the most part in contributing to the
magazines. In one resp'ect they seem more the
slaves of other people's backgrounds even than
Mrs. Potiphar was. Mrs. Potiphar only believed
that the right sort of liveries were not produced in
this country, whereas they swear that the right
sort of literature can never be produced in this
country — or at least not till our backgrounds are
ever so many centuries thicker than they are now.
I am unable, looking back, to see any value what
ever in these decades of sheer sterile complaint of
sterility, because no ruins can be seen against the
sky, because no naiads are dreamed of in the
Hudson or mermaids in Cape Cod Bay, and be
cause most people who are born in Indianapolis
seem glad to get away from it when they can.

For one sign that we have changed too fast I
can produce two signs that we have not changed
half fast enough. If there is no moss here on
the walls of ancient battlements there is plenty
of moss in our heads, and, so far as tenacity of
tradition is concerned, I can produce a dozen
United States Senators who are fully as pic
turesque, if only you will regard them internally,

OUR REFINEMENT 223

as the quaintest peasant in the quaintest part of
France. Backgrounds are not lost here just be
cause we move about; backgrounds are simply
worn inside, often with the ivy clustering on them.
Who has not talked with some expatriated Boston
man and found him as reposeful, as redolent of
sad, forgotten, far-off things, as any distant pros
pect of Stoke-Pogis? In fact, it seems as if these
pale expositors of backgrounds had merely visited
the monuments they praise — inside some Boston
man — and that, I confess, is the most irritating
thing to me about them. They have never really
looked at anything themselves, but only learned
from others what they ought to seem to see. And
it is absurd to tax us with a lack of memory, when
in some of our most exclusive literary circles there
is notoriously nothing but a memory to be seen.
There is too much Stoke-Pogis in a Boston man,
if anything, in proportion to other things. Even
the casual foreign visitor has noticed it.

I have great respect for the religion of the
Quakers, whose name, I understand, comes from
the phrase of a founder about quaking and shak
ing in the fear of the Lord. And if that is the
real reason why they quake I believe they are
justified not only in their quaking, but in trying
to make other people quake. But these Delsartean
literary quakers correctly tremulous in the pres
ence of antiquity, these "cultured" minds, not only

224 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

palsied by their own advantages, but intent on
palsying others, bring back no good report to any
body in regard to the good things in the world.

I do not know whether a poet, like a sugar
beet, requires a soil with peculiar properties; and,
in regard to the poet, I do not know what the
peculiar properties ought to be. Zoning of verse,
comparative literary crop statistics, mean annual
density of ideas, ratio of true poetry to square
miles and population within a given period, are
all outside my limitations. The t'heory that bone-
dust fertilizers are the things for poets does not
always seem to work, even when the bone-dust is
that of the Crusaders, and I have read lyrics from
cathedral towns which, though infinitely more
decorous than the brass band of my native village,
were equally remote from literature. Still there
may be something in it. But I do know, even
better than I wish I did, two generations of writ
ers on the theme, who have been saying, with
hardly any deviation in their phrases, that this is
the land where poets cannot grow; and I know-
them for the sort of persons who, if by chance a
poet should grow in defiance of their theory,
could not tell him from a sugar beet. They are
unaware of any growing thing which stands be
fore them unaccompanied by bibliography. Un
less there were antecedent books about an object
they would not know that the object was a poet.

OUR REFINEMENT 225

As the words culture and refinement have been
applied and as they have been exemplified in
American letters they have come to carry a curse
for all save little bands of unpleasant and self-con
scious persons who are themselves fidgetting about
it. "Culture" is not absorbed, but packed in, al
ways with a view to being taken out again with
out a wrinkle in it, and it does nothing to the man
who gets it, but he means to do a lot with it to
you. It is absurd to suppose that the human con
tainer of it takes any personal interest in his
contents.

Of course I am not speaking of the essence of
the thing, but only of the implications of the word
as they have been seared into our social experi
ence. I do not mean that humane learning blasts
an American, but I do mean that among those
who are known as cultured Americans learning
is not humane. And I am not condemning the
present moment. It has nothing to do with the
rudeness of young people, jazz bands, the corrup
tion of the English language, the cot of gowns
down the back, war psychology, the Bolshevism
of college professors, fox-trotting, the neglect of
the classics, movies, commercialism, syndicalism,
indecencies on the stage, popular novels, femin
ism, or any other of the unheard-of horrors that
the middle-aged mind associates with the break
down of civilization. There is no sign that Amer-

226 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

lean civilization is breaking down in this respect,
for the simple reason that there is no sign that
American civilization in this respect ever existed.
There is no sign that among any considerable
body of cultured Americans learning was ever
humane, and it is lucky for us that vivacious men
at every period of our national life have revolted
from it. Ten years of Greek study would not
have hurt Mark Twain, but ten years' contact
with the sort of persons who studied Greek would
have destroyed him. Historical studies would not
have suffocated Walt Whitman; even after read
ing Bishop Stufobs he might have remained our
poet of democracy. But association with modern
historians would have done for him. Had Walt
Whitman taken the same course that I did at a
school of political science, he would have gone
mad or become a college president.

What was it that so pinched the mind of Henry
Adams, readers of the Education of Henry
Adams are always asking, though one would think
the answer could not be missed. It was Boston
and Cambridge in the eighteen-fifties and an acute
personal consciousness of membership in the
Adams family. It was a lucky thing for both
Jews and Christians that Moses was not a cul
tured Boston man, for the Ten Commandments
would not only have been multiplied by fifty, but
a supplemental volume of thousands of really

OUR REFINEMENT 227

indispensable gentilities would have come out
every year. No man knew better than the
late W. D. Howells the Sinaitic rigor of the social
scruple when the descendant of the Puritans once
turned his conscience away from God and bent
it upon culture. The genial tale of The Lady of
the Aroostook might well have been a tragedy.
Indeed, the passion of a man bred in the right
Boston set and immensely conscious of it — a man
who read the right books in the right way, knew
the right people, visited the right places abroad —
the passion of such a man for a girl who not only
said "I want to know," but who had never heard
of a chaperon — there is a situation not only tragic
in itself, but close to the edge of violence, termin
able, one would say, only by accidental death,
murder, or suicide. Desdemona was smothered
for less. That Mr. Howells should see it to a
comparatively cheerful end without calling down
the lightning proves merely the magic of his
hand. But Mr. Howells did not conceal one
painful consequence. Hero and heroine both
were outcasts from culture for evermore. Never
again did they enter the doors of the right people
of Cambridge. "He's done the wisest thing he
could by taking her out to California. She never
would have gone down here." This was the doom
that culture pronounced in the final chapter. For,
although at nineteen years of age Lydia ceased

228 THE MARGIN OF HESITATION

to say she wanted to know, the early stain re
mained. She bore it to the grave. And this end
ing was entirely just and Mr. Howells did not ex
aggerate in the slightest degree the rigors of the
law, for, though Lydia as he made her was the
most natural and adorable creature imaginable,
he was right in saying that in the cultured circles
of the time and place she would not have gone
down.

The taboo of culture is of course no new thing,
but dates from a comparatively ancient grudge in
our brief literary history. People are ashamed of
their culture nowadays, a friend of mine was say
ing, and he went on to cite instances of the ex
clusion from human intercourse of all those mat
ters of general interest which make intercourse
human. And why are you so afraid of general
ideas? one visiting Frenchman after another has
asked me, and I have never yet been able to think
of a suitable reply. And they go back to France
on no better terms with the English language than
when they came. It is impossible to arouse any
enthusiasm for our spoken language in a French
man, for he does not believe that conversation in
his sense of the word is ever carried on in it.
And he is certainly right. The range of a quite
ordinary Frenchman's every-day talk is not gen
erally permitted in this country. Religion may
be discussed with a French chauffeur on a footing

OUR REFINEMENT 229

of naturalness absolutely out of place at an
American authors' club. You may confess a
literary taste to a French washwoman, but not to
a New York banker. The philosophic specula
tions of French barber shops would be shockingly
pedantic at our dinner tables.

Of course the main reason why the conversa
tion of a novelist does not differ from that of a
shoe manufacturer is simply because as a rule
there is no real difference between them. But
there is sometimes another side to it. The man
of letters who excludes letters from his talk is
not necessarily ashamed of them. But he knows
the traditional association in this country of
culture with ennui, and he knows that it is amply
justified. Acquaintance with the personalities of
cultured groups naturally disposes a sensitive
mind to the cultivation of an appearance of
illiteracy. Thought is not a social nuisance in
this country, but thinkers generally are. Hence,
when seized by an irresistible impulse to express
any sort of an idea, a well-bred man will always
leave the room, just as he would do if seized by
an uncontrollable fit of coughing.

AND TO Sf n

S'-°° °N

TC . SO «NT8 ON T»

CENTS °N THE FOURTH

DEC 27 193

OCT 5 1936
FEB 41937

5 1939

FEB5

SEVENTH DAY

'

LD 21-50?/i-8,.32

tfftl-7
MAY 6192

Cc

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY